After the rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1933, his father sent him to South Africa where he was able to enroll in school with funding from the Hochschild Family Foundation established by Berthold Hochschild, a cousin of his grandfather.

[4] In 1936, Hochschild earned a BS degree in mathematics from University of Cape Town in Union of South Africa.

[1] Hochschild completed his thesis in 1941 at Princeton University with Claude Chevalley on Semisimple Algebras and Generalized Derivations.

In 1979 Hochschild was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and in 1980 he was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize of the AMS.

[6] Ruth was born in Germany and fled with her mother in 1939; the couple met at the University of Illinois where she was earning her M.S.