He returned to Lodz in August 1938 during summer vacation, but the outbreak of WW II caught his family by surprise.
At the end of June 1940 he, as a member of a Polish engineer company, was evacuated to England and then stationed in Scotland until the allied invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Minc was sent in May 1941 to an officer engineer school in Dundee, Scotland, and in 1944 was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British army.
[3] His doctoral dissertation Logarithmetics, Index Polynomials, and Bifurcating Root Trees was supervised by Ivor Etherington.
He was one of the important mathematicians, along with Robert Charles Thompson and Ky Fan, recruited by Marvin Marcus, for the linear algebra and matrix theory school in UCSB's mathematics department.
[2][3] In 1966, Marvin Marcus and Henryk Minc received the Mathematical Association of America's Lester R. Ford Award for their 1965 article Permanents.
[6][7] Minc published articles on Biblical archaeology and collected ancient Jewish coins and other antiquities.
During his retirement, he was an active participant in the Santa Barbara Scottish Society and, with his wife Catherine, visited Scotland many times.