Branko Grünbaum
Encyclopedia
Croatia
Croatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
n-born mathematician
Mathematician
A mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
and a professor emeritus
Emeritus
Emeritus is a post-positive adjective that is used to designate a retired professor, bishop, or other professional or as a title. The female equivalent emerita is also sometimes used.-History:...
at the University of Washington
University of Washington
University of Washington is a public research university, founded in 1861 in Seattle, Washington, United States. The UW is the largest university in the Northwest and the oldest public university on the West Coast. The university has three campuses, with its largest campus in the University...
in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem ; ; abbreviated HUJI) is Israel's second-oldest university, after the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. The Hebrew University has three campuses in Jerusalem and one in Rehovot. The world's largest Jewish studies library is located on its Edmond J...
in Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
.
He has authored over 200 papers, mostly in discrete geometry
Discrete geometry
Discrete geometry and combinatorial geometry are branches of geometry that study combinatorial properties and constructive methods of discrete geometric objects. Most questions in discrete geometry involve finite or discrete sets of basic geometric objects, such as points, lines, planes, circles,...
, an area in which he is particularly well known for various meticulous classification theorem
Classification theorem
In mathematics, a classification theorem answers the classification problem "What are the objects of a given type, up to some equivalence?". It gives a non-redundant enumeration: each object is equivalent to exactly one class....
s. 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
Aperiodic tiling
An aperiodic tiling is a tiling obtained from an aperiodic set of tiles. Properly speaking, aperiodicity is a property of particular sets of tiles; any given finite tiling is either periodic or non-periodic...
(the most famous example of which is the Penrose tiling
Penrose tiling
A Penrose tiling is a non-periodic tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles named after Sir Roger Penrose, who investigated these sets in the 1970s. The aperiodicity of the Penrose prototiles implies that a shifted copy of a Penrose tiling will never match the original...
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 diagram
Venn diagram
Venn diagrams or set diagrams are diagrams that show all possible logical relations between a finite collection of sets . Venn diagrams were conceived around 1880 by John Venn...
s. He is an editor and a frequent contributor to Geombinatorics
Geombinatorics
Geombinatorics is a mathematical research journal founded by Alexander Soifer and published by the University of Colorado, USA, since 1991 under an international board of editors...
.
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
Gil Kalai
Gil Kalai is the Henry and Manya Noskwith Professor of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and adjunct professor of mathematics and of computer science at Yale University, and the editor of the Israel Journal of Mathematics.-Biography:...
and Victor Klee
Victor Klee
Victor L. Klee, Jr. was a mathematician specialising in convex sets, functional analysis, analysis of algorithms, optimization, and combinatorics. He spent almost his entire career at the University of Washington in Seattle.Born in San Francisco, Vic Klee earned his B.A...
edited a special issue of Discrete and Computational Geometry
Discrete and Computational Geometry
Discrete & Computational Geometry is a peer-reviewed mathematics journal published quarterly by Springer. Founded in 1986, the journal publishes articles on in discrete geometry and computational geometry....
in his honor, the "Grünbaum Festschrift". In 2005, Grünbaum was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize
Leroy P. Steele Prizes
The Leroy P. Steele Prizes are awarded every year by the American Mathematical Society, for distinguished research work and writing in the field of mathematics. Since 1993 there has been a formal division into three categories....
for Mathematical Exposition from the American Mathematical Society
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, which it does with various publications and conferences as well as annual monetary awards and prizes to mathematicians.The society is one of the...
.
Grünbaum has supervised 18 Ph.D.s and currently has at least 98 mathematical "descendants".