Alexander Grossmann (5 August 1930 – 12 February 2019) was a French-American physicist of Croatian origin.

Early life

Aleksandar Grossmann was born to a Jewish family in Zagreb, where he was attending a gymnasium when World War II in Yugoslavia started. Forced to leave school and convert to Catholicism under the rule of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, he and his family fled to Montecatini Terme in Italy, and then Geneva in Switzerland. After the war, he returned to Zagreb and completed high school as well as graduated mathematics at the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb in 1952.

Career

Grossmann started work at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, and collaborated with international visiting scholars between 1952 and 1955. He travelled to the United States in 1955, working in the physics departments of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, Brandeis University, and the Courant Institute, NYU, then again at the IAS until 1963. After one year at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, he joined the "Centre de Physique Théorique de Marseille" (the CPT) as it was being created in 1966, at the request of Daniel Kastler. He then became a research supervisor at the CNRS. At the Université de la Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II in Luminy campus he did pioneering work on wavelet analysis with Jean Morlet in 1984. This in effect showed this identity's applicability to signal analysis. In 1993, he became involved in genomic research as part of a group formed in Gif-sur-Yvette. He worked in this area with what eventually became the Laboratoire de Mathématique & Modélisation d'Evry until 2014.

Tributes

Grossmann's lifelong scientific achievements were commemorated at a scientific conference held in his honor and that of Yves Meyer on 12-13 June 2019 at the Institut de Mathématiques d'Orsay.

Publications