Adolf Edward Nussbaum (10 January 1925 – 31 October 2009)[1] was a German-born American theoretical mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly 40 years.
[2] Both his father, Karl Nussbaum, a wounded veteran of World War I during which he had been awarded the Iron Cross, and his mother, Franziska, was murdered at Auschwitz.
[2] Shortly after emigrating to the United States, he studied mathematics at Brooklyn College before transferring to Columbia University in New York where he earned his Master of Arts degree in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1957.
[3] While writing his thesis for Columbia, he worked in the academic year 1952–1953 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton with John von Neumann,[4] a mathematician who used Hilbert spaces in his development of the mathematical basis of quantum mechanics.
[2] In the meantime he had worked at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, where he co-authored papers with Allen Devinatz, and at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.