Branko Grünbaum

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Branko Grünbaum in 1975.

Branko Grünbaum (born 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.^[1] He has authored over 200 papers, mostly in discrete geometry, an area in which he is particularly well known for various meticulous classification theorems. His paper on line arrangements appears to have been the inspiration for a paper by N. G. de Bruijn which is generally held to have initiated the subject of 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 classical 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 17 Ph.D.s and currently has at least 66 mathematical "descendants".^[1]

[edit] Selected publications

Grünbaum, Branko (2003), Kaibel, Volker; Klee, Victor & Ziegler, Günter M., eds., Convex polytopes (2nd ed.), New York & London: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 0-387-00424-6 .
Grünbaum, Branko; and Shephard, G. C. (1987). Tilings and Patterns. New York: W. H. Freeman. ISBN 0-716-71193-1.