Branko Grünbaum
Croatian-American mathematician at the University of Washington (1929-2018)
Branko Grünbaum (Hebrew: ברנקו גרונבאום; 2 October 1929 – 14 September 2018) was a Croatian-born mathematician of Jewish descent and a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle. He received his Ph.D. in 1957 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Life
Grünbaum was born in Osijek, then part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, on 2 October 1929. His father was Jewish and his mother was Catholic, so during World War II the family survived the Shoah in Croatia by living at his Catholic grandmother's home. After the war, as a high school student, he met Zdenka Bienenstock, a Jew who had lived through the war hidden in a convent while the rest of her family were killed. Grünbaum became a student at the University of Zagreb, but grew disenchanted with the communist ideology of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, applied for emigration to Israel, and traveled with his family and Zdenka to Haifa in 1949.
In Israel, Grünbaum found a job in Tel Aviv, but in 1950 returned to the study of mathematics, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned a master's degree in 1954 and in the same year married Zdenka, who continued as a master's student in chemistry. He served a tour of duty as an operations researcher in the Israeli Air Force beginning in 1955, and he and Zdenka had the first of their two sons in 1956. He completed his Ph.D. in 1957; his dissertation concerned convex geometry and was supervised by Aryeh Dvoretzky.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q898670. VIAF identifies the subject as 41917212. The Library of Congress control number is n81062544. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929, 2018, 1957 and 1949.
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