Van Brummelen earned his PhD degree from Simon Fraser University in 1993,[2] and served as a professor of mathematics at Bennington College from 1999 to 2006.

He then transferred to Quest University Canada as a founding faculty member.

In 2020, he became the dean of the Faculty of Natural and Applied Sciences at Trinity Western University in Langley, BC.

[3] Glen Van Brummelen has published the first major history in English of the origins and early development of trigonometry, The Mathematics of the Heavens and the Earth: The Early History of Trigonometry.

[5][6] In 2016 he received a Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.