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.
[1] Grossmann started work at the Ruđer Bošković Institute, and collaborated with international visiting scholars between 1952 and 1955.
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.
[3] At the Université de la Méditerranée Aix-Marseille II in Luminy campus he did pioneering work on wavelet analysis with Jean Morlet in 1984.