James Wayne Hunt

James Wayne Hunt was the first born of two to the union of Augustus and Bernyce Hunt on August 5, 1952 in Trenton, NJ. He departed this life on March 21, 2021. 

A major lover of jazz, funk, R&B and photography, his quiet and quick witted personality charmed most everyone he met. That same love of music has been shared with many of his friends as well as his daughters.

Wayne graduated cum laude with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Princeton University, and then went on to receive both his M.S. and PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

While there, he, a part of the original group of students who started The Society of Black Scientists and Engineers, which is still in operation to this day. In 1976, he refined and submitted the Hunt-Szymanski algorithm, a variant that was originally proposed by Harold S. Stone. It is a solution to the longest common subsequence problem. It was one of the first non-heuristic algorithms used in data comparison. To this day, variations of this algorithm are found in incremental version control systems, wiki engines, and molecular phylogenetics research software.

This ingenuity led him to become a department head at A&T Bell Labs, a unit director at UNIX System Laboratories, and finally, the Management Systems Product Realization Vice President of Lucent Technologies. He remained with Lucent for a decade before retiring in 2004.

Cherishing fond memories of Wayne are his two daughters Brittany Morgan Hunt and Bentley Monique Hunt, his Aunt Yvonne Long, Uncle Cordell Wise and niece Dana Hunt as well as a host of cousins and many more loving relatives and friends. He was preceded by his parents, Augustus Hunt, Bernyce P. Hunt, brother Craig Hunt, Uncle Leon Hunt, Aunt Delilah "Dee" Hunt, Aunt Marie "Sis" Washington, Uncle Wilbur Washington and Aunt Peggy Kent.