Charles Himmelberg, born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1931, went to Rockhurst High School and College and earned a masters and doctorate at the University of Notre Dame, specializing in Topology and Analysis. He worked for a short time at the Midwest Research Institute (MRI) in Kansas City before becoming a mathematics professor at the University of Kansas in 1965. He took a sabbatical in 1975 to teach at the University of Florence in Italy. He was chairman of the KU mathematics department from 1978 to 1999 and retired in 2005.

Some of Himmelberg's areas of study have included uniform spaces, retracts and selections, topological groups, homotopy theory and stochastic games. He submitted articles to peer reviewed journals and reviewed and refereed mathematical theorems and academic papers and textbooks. He and his wife, Mary Pat Himmelberg, have a KU mathematics graduate student merit award in their names.

[Information retrieved from University Archives morgue file and Endacott Society oral history transcript.]