Two dear friends, and great geometers, Ricky Pollack and Branko Grünbaum passed away a few weeks ago. Ricky was a close friend that both Mazi my wife and I loved, and we were both fascinated by his wisdom, charm and love of life. Branko was my academic grand father and I met him through his writings many years before I had the privilege and pleasure to meet in person. Here are some pictures of Ricky and Branko. (If you have more, send me and I will add them.)
In future posts I will tell you a little about their mathematics. See also these posts about stories and math related to Ricky ( A Discrepancy Problem for Planar Configurations; Many triangulated three-spheres!; Academic Degrees and Sex; GLL: Polls and prediction and P=NP . ) and to Branko ( My Copy of Branko Grünbaum’s Convex Polytopes; The World of Michael Burt: When Architecture, Mathematics, and Art meet; Coloring Simple Polytopes and Triangulations; Budapest, Seattle, New Haven ; How the g-Conjecture Came About; GLL: What are proofs for , anyway.) (Links for blog posts on other blogs are welcome.)
Branko with Janos Pach
The legendary mathematical partnership and friendship of Ricky and Eli Goodman is rare in mathematics.
Five generations in Seattle: Branko was the advisor of Micha A Perles (and also of Joram Lindenstrauss, Moshe Rosenfeld, Joseph Zaks and many others). Micha was my advisor (and also of Meir Katchalski, Michael Kallay, Nati Linial Noga Alon and many others). Isabella Novik was my student and here we are with four student of Isabella: Michael Goff, Kurt Luoto, Andy Frohmaderand, and Steven Klee. (From left to right.)
Saugata Basu, Ricky Pollack and Marie-Francois Roy’s book Algorithms in real algebraic geometry.
