Danilo Blanuša

Danilo Blanuša (December 7, 1903 – August 8, 1987) was a Yugoslav mathematician, physicist, engineer and a professor at the University of Zagreb, SR Croatia.

Blanuša was born in Osijek, Austria-Hungary (today Croatia), into an ethnic Serb family. He attended elementary school in Vienna and Steyr in Austria and gymnasium in Osijek and Zagreb. He studied engineering in both Zagreb and Vienna and also mathematics and physics. His career started in Zagreb, where he started to work and lecture. His student Mileva Prvanović completed her doctorate in 1955, the first in geometry in Serbia. Blanuša was the dean of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Zagreb in the 1957-58 school year. He received the Ruđer Bošković prize in 1960. He died in Zagreb.

In mathematics, Blanuša became known for discovering the second and third known snarks in 1946 (the Petersen graph was the first), triggering a new area of graph theory. The study of snarks had its origin in the 1880 work of P. G. Tait, who at that time had proved that the four color theorem is equivalent to the statement that no snark is planar. Snarks were so named later by the American mathematician Martin Gardner in 1976, after the mysterious and elusive object of Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark.

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