Golumbic majored in mathematics at
Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1970 with bachelor's and master's degrees. He completed his Ph.D. at
Columbia University in 1975, with the dissertation
Comparability Graphs and a New Matroid supervised by
Samuel Eilenberg. He became an assistant professor in the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of
New York University from 1975 until 1980, when he moved to
Bell Laboratories. From 1983 to 1992 he worked for
IBM Research in Israel, and from 1992 to 2000 he was a professor of mathematics and computer science at
Bar-Ilan University. He moved to the
University of Haifa in 2000, where he founded the Caesarea Edmond Benjamin de Rothschild Institute for Interdisciplinary Applications of Computer Science. In 1989, Golumbic founded the Bar-Ilan Symposium in Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, a leading artificial intelligence conference in Israel. In 1990 Golumbic became the founding editor-in-chief of the journal
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, published by
Springer. ==Recognition==