Solomon Wolf Golomb (/ɡəˈloʊm/ gə-LOHM; May 30, 1932 – May 1, 2016) was an American mathematician, engineer, and professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, best known for his works on mathematical games. He most notably invented Cheskers (a hybrid between chess and checkers) in 1948. He also fully described polyominoes in 1953. He specialized in problems of combinatorial analysis, number theory, coding theory, and communications. Pentomino board games, based on his work, would go on to inspire Tetris.

Golomb, a Baltimore City College high school graduate, received his bachelor's degree from Johns Hopkins University and master's and doctorate in mathematics from Harvard University in 1957. His dissertation was "Problems in the Distribution of the Prime Numbers."

While working at the Glenn L. Martin Company, he became interested in communications theory and began working on shift register sequences. He spent his Fulbright year at the University of Oslo and then joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech, where he researched military and space communications. He joined the faculty of USC in 1963 and was awarded full tenure two years later.

Golomb pioneered the identification of the characteristics and merits of maximum length shift register sequences, also known as pseudorandom or pseudonoise sequences, which have extensive military, industrial, and consumer applications. Today, millions of cordless and cellular phones employ pseudorandom direct-sequence spread spectrum implemented with shift register sequences. His efforts made USC a center for communications research.

Golomb was the inventor of Golomb coding, a form of entropy encoding. Golomb rulers, used in astronomy and data encryption, are also named for him, as is one of the main generation techniques of Costas arrays, the Lempel-Golomb generation method.

He was a regular columnist, writing Golomb's Puzzle Column in the IEEE Information Society Newsletter. He was also a frequent contributor to Scientific American's Mathematical Games column (The column did much to publicize his discoveries about polyominoes and pentominoes) and a frequent participant in Gathering 4 Gardner conferences. Among his contributions to recreational mathematics are Rep-tiles. He also contributed a puzzle to each issue of the Johns Hopkins Magazine, a monthly publication of his undergraduate alma mater, for a column called "Golomb's Gambits," and was a frequent contributor to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

Golomb was a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

In 1985, he received the Shannon Award of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE.