Branko Grünbaum

Branko Grünbaum, who lived from 2 October 1929 to 14 September 2018, was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. Born in Osijek, he emigrated to Israel in 1949, studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and completed his doctorate there in 1957 under Aryeh Dvoretzky with a dissertation on convex geometry. After a postdoctoral year at the Institute for Advanced Study he joined the University of Washington, where he held a full professorship from 1966 until he retired in 2001. He wrote more than two hundred papers, mostly in discrete geometry, and is known for classification theorems and for the abstract theory of polyhedra. His monograph Convex Polytopes became the standard textbook, and Tilings and Patterns, written with G. C. Shephard, brought the subject to a wide audience. He received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition in 2005 and supervised nineteen doctoral students.