Fritz Müller was born 1926 in a little town near Zurich and graduated in 1954 in Geographies and Geology from the University of Zurich. After expeditions to Greenland and Mount Everest, he concentrated his work on cold region hydrology. In 1959 he became the scientific leader of a Canadian expedition to Axel Heiberg Island organised by McGill University, where he became Assistance Professor of Glaciology. In 1970 he changed to ETH Zurich, where he became Head of the Institute of Geography and started the investigation of the North Water Polynya in Baffin Bay. Müller also worked on the glacier inventories of the Swiss Alps and the world. He became director of the World Glacier Monitoring Service.