[1][2] Borůvka was born in Uherský Ostroh, a town in Moravia, Austria-Hungary (today in the Czech Republic), the son of a school headmaster.

[1][2] He continued to travel abroad through the late 1920s and early 1930s, to Cartan in Paris again as well as to Wilhelm Blaschke in Hamburg.

[2] The problem of designing efficient electric distribution networks had been suggested to Borůvka by his friend Jindřich Saxel, an employee of the West Moravian Power Company, during World War I.

[6][7][8] It is more suitable for distributed and parallel computation than many other minimum spanning tree algorithms, can achieve linear time complexity on planar graphs and more generally in minor-closed graph families,[9] and plays a central role in the randomized linear time algorithm of Karger, Klein & Tarjan (1995).

[2] A textbook by him on groups and groupoids, originally published in Czech in 1944, went through several expansions, and translations, including an English edition in 1976.