Adolf Nussbaumer
 Adolf Nussbaumer    ( mathematician) | ||||||||||||
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| Born | 10 January 1925 Germany | |||||||||||
| Died | 31 October 2009 (Age 84) | |||||||||||
| Nationality | US | |||||||||||
| Ethnicity | Jewish | |||||||||||
| Alma mater | • Brooklyn College • Columbia University | |||||||||||
Washington University professor of mathematics who attended Bilderberg/1978, possibly to discuss the neutron bomb.
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Adolf Edward Nussbaum was a German-Jewish American theoretical mathematician who was a professor of mathematics at Washington University in St. Louis for nearly 40 years. He attended the 1978 Bilderberg conference. Given his mathematical background, he might have been selected for the discussion around the neutron bomb.
Background
Nussbaum was born to a Jewish family in Rheydt, a borough of the German city Mönchengladbach in northwestern Germany, in 1925. 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, were killed by the German government during the war. His brother, Erwin Nussbaum, was also captured and killed. Nussbaum and his sister, Lieselotte, were separated and sent on a Kindertransport to Belgium in 1939.[1]
When Belgium was invaded by Germany, Nussbaum escaped to southern France, then under the Vichy government. He lived there at an orphanage known as Château de la Hille. He began his teaching career there, while still a teenager, teaching mathematics to the younger children.[1] After being captured twice, and jailed once by the Nazis, he escaped on foot to Switzerland, where he attended the University of Zurich,[2] studying both mathematics and physics. In 1947, he was sponsored by relatives in New Jersey to emigrate to the United States.[1]
Career
Shortly after emigrating to the United States, he studied mathematics at Brooklyn College before transferring to Columbia University in New York where he received his Master of Arts degree in 1950 and his Ph.D. in 1957.[2]
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,[2] a mathematician who used Hilbert spaces in his development of the mathematical basis of quantum mechanics. Hilbert spaces eventually became Nussbaum's area of expertise and he wrote several papers with von Neumann on this topic. During this period, Nussbaum also became acquainted with Albert Einstein, another of the original group at the Institute for Advanced Study.[1] Nussbaum's thesis was accepted with no revisions and he received his doctorate shortly thereafter.[1]
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. He followed Devinatz to St. Louis to teach at Washington University in 1958.[1]
In 1962, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies working with Robert Oppenheimer; in 1967-68 he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.[1]
He joined Washington University's mathematics faculty as an assistant professor in 1958. He became a full professor in 1966 and taught until 1995, when he was named an emeritus professor.[2]
Event Participated in
| Event | Start | End | Location(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilderberg/1978 | 21 April 1978 | 23 April 1978 | US New Jersey Princeton University | The 26th Bilderberg, held in the US |
