Hugo Christiaan Hamaker (23 March 1905 in Broek op Langedijk, North Holland – 7 September 1993 in Eindhoven) was a Dutch scientist, who was responsible for the Hamaker theory which explains the van der Waals forces between objects larger than molecules. His 1937 paper was heavily cited. In 1959 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.