Henryk Minc

Henryk Minc (1919 to 2013) was a Polish-born, British-educated American professor of mathematics, known for his 1963 conjecture that became the Bregman-Minc inequality, proved by Lev Bregman in 1973. Born in Lodz to a Jewish family, he escaped Poland in 1939 and served in the Polish and then British armies during the Second World War, dismantling minefields; his parents died in Auschwitz in 1944. He took an M.A. in 1955 and a doctorate in 1959 at the University of Edinburgh under Ivor Etherington, taught in Scotland and at the University of British Columbia, and moved to the United States in 1960. He was at the University of Florida until 1963 and then a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara until his retirement in 1990. He began in non-associative algebra and the intuitionist foundation of mathematics, then became a leading expert on permanents and nonnegative matrices, collaborating with Marvin Marcus; they won the Mathematical Association of America Lester R. Ford Award in 1966. He wrote the book Permanents and collected Robert Burns manuscripts.