Vašek Chvátal was born in Prague and received his undergraduate degree in mathematics in the same city. He left Czechoslovakia in August 1968, three days after its Soviet-led invasion. Having earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Waterloo in the fall of 1970, he taught mathematics, computer science, and operations research at McGill, Stanford, Université de Montréal, and Rutgers. From 2004 till his retirement in 2014, he held a Canada Research Chair, first in Combinatorial Optimization and then in Discrete Mathematics, at Concordia University in Montreal. His research agenda has ranged from graph theory and combinatorics to linear programming and cutting planes to analysis of algorithms to the traveling salesman problem. In 2015, he shared the John von Neumann Theory Prize 'for seminal and profound contributions to the theoretical foundations of optimization' with Jean Bernard Lasserre. His most recent book, "The Discrete Mathematical Charms of Paul Erdős", was published last August by Cambridge University Press.