His intellectual origins were at Lwów School of Mathematics, particularly well known for fundamental contributions to functional analysis.
His entire family was murdered during World War II, he himself emigrated to the United States.
Supervised by Francis Joseph Murray, he got doctorate degree in 1942 for the thesis "On the Direct Product of Banach Spaces".
Shortly after being appointed to a junior professorship, he joined the United States army where during training he suffered a back injury which affected him for the remainder of his life.
At National Research Council, by two years he worked with John von Neumann and Nelson Dunford.