Editors' Note: This article by Professor Grünbaum of the University of Washington caused the MAA some embarrassment: the logo of the MAA—a regular icosahedron—that appeared on publications and letterhead was mathematically wrong. At least it's wrong under the obvious assumption that the polyhedron was intended to be regular. You can read the details here.

Branko Grünbaum was born in 1929 in Osijek, Croatia (then part of Yugoslavia). He earned his PhD at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 1958. After a two-year stay at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he moved to the University of Washington, where he has remained throughout his career, with the exception of occasional short visits elsewhere. His books include Convex Polytopes (Interscience, 1967), Arrangements and Spreads (American Mathematical Society, 1972), and (with G. D. Shephard) Tilings and Patterns (Freeman, 1987). Grünbaum and Shephard won an Allendoerfer Award in 1977 for an article, “Tiling by regular polygons.”

We append here a short note by Doris Schattschneider outlining the history of the MAA logo. With Grünbaum's discovery, the logo was corrected and one might have assumed that only a correct logo would be used in the future. Alas, the incorrect logo surfaced again on the cover of the Monthly in 1996. It was eventually corrected yet again in 2000. It's hard to keep a bad illustration down. For more details on this figure and others see William Casselman's article “Pictures and proofs,” Notices of the American Mathematical Society 47 (November 2000), 1257–66.