(Obituary by Alex Chorin)

Grigory Isaakovich was born in Moscow on July 10, 1927, and studied mathematics at Moscow University under the supervision of A.N. Kolmogorov and B.M. Levitan. He went on to become one of leading applied mathematicians world-wide, with extraordinary contributions to a wide variety of fields, including fluid mechanics, turbulence, flow in porous media, fracture, materials science, scaling, asymptotics and intermediate asymptotics. Despite the excellence of his work he faced many difficulties due to his Jewishness and also to his lack of enthusiasm for the regime. After the fall of communism, he could travel, and was appointed as the G.I. Taylor Professor of Fluid Mechanics at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. When he retired from that position he came to the United States, held a few short-term visiting positions, and then joined the Mathematics Department of the University of California, Berkeley, as a Professor in Residence, with a concurrent appointment at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

Professor Barenblatt held appointments as a foreign honorary member at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Royal Society of London, as well as a long list of other professional societies in multiple countries.

The long list of his awards includes the G.I. Taylor award from the US Society for Engineering Science, the Maxwell prize of the International Committee on Applied and Industrial Mathematics, the Lagrange Prize of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and the Timoshenko Award of the ASME.