Herbert Izbicki was born in Vienna. After attending a primary school in his hometown between 1934 and 1938, he fled into exile to Czechoslovakia with his parents. Until 1942, he attended a Czech primary school there. He spent the last two years of WWII in a concentration camp in Bystřice u Benešova in Bohemia. After the war, he returned to Vienna, where he attended the secondary school and passed the final exams with distinction on the 20th March 1947. On the 8th April 1947, he enrolled at the faculty of arts at the University of Vienna (Universität Wien). He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy (Dr. phil.; major subject mathematics, minor subject physics) on the 23rd of March 1955. From 1957 to 1958 he worked as assistant professor of mathematics under Prof K. A. Bush at the University of Idaho in Moscow, USA. He then headed the mathematics department at the Study Society for Atomic Energy (Studiengesellschaft für Atomenergie) at the Seibersdorf reactor centre from 1958 to 1967. In 1960, he habilitated at the University of Vienna and was a regular lecturer there and at the Vienna University of Technology (Technische Universität Wien). Between 1967 and 1988, he was employed in the research department of IBM Austria. He published numerous scientific papers dealing with graph theory and supervised many dissertations (including that of the well-known mathematician Herbert Fleischner).

His only literary work - the collection of poems Noch ist es still (Still it is quiet) - was published under the pseudonym Herbert Jakob Eisen.