Branko Grünbaum

Branko Grünbaum
Branko Grünbaum in 1975.
Born	(1929-10-12) 12 October 1929 Osijek, Yugoslavia
Nationality	Croatian American
Alma mater	Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	University of Washington
Doctoral advisor	Aryeh Dvoretzky
Doctoral students	Joram Lindenstrauss Micha Perles

Branko Grünbaum (born 12 October 1929) is a Croatian-born mathematician and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He has authored over 200 papers, mostly in discrete geometry, an area in which he is particularly well known for various meticulous classification theorems. He has been a key pioneer in the theory of abstract polyhedra.

His paper on line arrangements may have inspired a paper by N. G. de Bruijn on quasiperiodic tilings (the most famous example of which is the Penrose tiling of the plane). This paper is also cited by the authors of a monograph on hyperplane arrangements as having inspired their research.

Grünbaum has also devised a multi-set generalisation of Venn diagrams. He is an editor and a frequent contributor to Geombinatorics.

Grünbaum's classic monograph Convex polytopes, first published in 1967, has become the main textbook on the subject. His monograph Tilings and Patterns, coauthored with G. C. Shephard, helped to rejuvenate interest in this classic field, and has proved popular with nonmathematical audiences as well as with mathematicians.

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.

Grünbaum has supervised 18 Ph.D.s and currently has at least 98 mathematical "descendants".

Selected publications

• Grünbaum, Branko (2003), Kaibel, Volker; Klee, Victor; Ziegler, Günter M. (eds.), Convex Polytopes, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, vol. 221 (2nd ed.), Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-00424-6.
• Grünbaum, Branko; Shephard, G. C. (1987), Tilings and Patterns, New York: W. H. Freeman, ISBN 0-7167-1193-1.

See also

• Pentagram map

References

• Orlik, Peter; and Terao, Hiroaki (1992), Arrangements of hyperplanes, New York: Springer, ISBN 3-540-55259-6{{citation}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

External links

• Personal web page