Branko Grünbaum

Branko Grünbaum was born in 1929 in Osijek

Grünbaum was born in Osijek, then in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, in 1929. His father was Jewish and his mother Catholic, and the family survived World War II at his Catholic grandmother's home. He began studying at the University of Zagreb, but in 1949 he emigrated to Haifa with his family and Zdenka Bienenstock.

After working in Tel Aviv, he returned to mathematics in 1950 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a master's degree in 1954 and married Zdenka that year. He completed his Ph.D. in 1957 on convex geometry under Aryeh Dvoretzky.

From 1955 he served in the Israeli Air Force as an operations researcher, finishing in 1958. He then went to the US as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study. Israeli authorities later ruled he was not a Jew and annulled his marriage, and the couple remarried in Seattle.

He stayed linked to the Hebrew University until 1966, then settled in the US. He became a full professor at the University of Washington in 1966 and retired in 2001. He published over 200 papers, mostly in discrete geometry and convexity, and wrote books such as Convex Polytopes and Tilings and Patterns.

He received the Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2005. He died in 2018.