Thomas Henry Brylawski (June 17, 1944 – July 18, 2007) was an American mathematician and professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Brylawski was born in 1944, and grew up in Washington, D.C.[1][2] He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his undergraduate degree, finishing with a Bachelor of Science in 1966.

[1][9][10] Another influential early paper of Brylawski's, published in the same journal, described the influence of a modular element in the lattice of flats on the characteristic polynomial of a matroid.

[1][11] Brylawski also contributed expository chapters to several matroid theory books that appeared in the Encyclopedia of Mathematics and its Applications series published by Cambridge University Press.

[1] He gave lectures on mathematics in art on two occasions at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[13][14] A memorial conference was held in honor of Brylawski in October 2008 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,[1] and a special issue of the European Journal of Combinatorics in 2011 was dedicated as a tribute to the work of Brylawski.