Solomon Wolf Golomb is an American mathematician, engineer and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. Most notably he invented Cheskers in 1948 and coined the name. He also fully described polyominoes andpentominoes in 1953. He has specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory and communications. His game of pentomino inspiredTetris. Golomb  was born on May 30, 1932 in Baltimore, Maryland.

Golomb, a graduate of the Baltimore City College high school, received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and master's and doctorate degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1957 with a dissertation on "Problems in the Distribution of the Prime Numbers". Golomb was the inventor of Golomb coding, a form of entropy encoding. Golomb rulers, used in astronomy and in data encryption, are also named for him, as is one of the main generation techniques of Costas arrays, the Lempel-Golomb generation method. In 2011, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. That same year, it was announced that he had been selected to receive the National Medal of Science.