Branko Grünbaum

Branko Grünbaum (; 2 October 1929 – 14 September 2018) was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Life Grünbaum was born in Osijek, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on 2 October 1929. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic, so during World War II the family survived the Shoah in Croatia by living at his Catholic grandmother's home. After the war, as a high school student, he met Zdenka Bienenstock, a Jew who had lived through the war hidden in a convent while the rest of her family were killed. Grünbaum became a student at the University of Zagreb, but grew disenchanted with the communist ideology of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, applied for emigration to Israel, and traveled with his family and Zdenka to Haifa in 1949.

In Israel, Grünbaum found a job in Tel Aviv, but in 1950 returned to the study of mathematics, In 2004, Gil Kalai and Victor Klee edited a special issue of Discrete and Computational Geometry in his honor, the "Grünbaum Festschrift". In 2005, Grünbaum was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the American Mathematical Society. He was a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the AAAS and in 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Grünbaum supervised 19 Ph.D.s and currently has at least 200 mathematical descendants. . . .

As editor