A. Edward Nussbaum, Ph.D., professor emeritus of mathematics in Arts & Sciences, died Oct. 31, 2009, of congestive heart failure at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 84.
Nussbaum taught at the University for 37 years, retiring in 1995.
Edward N. Wilson remembers sitting in on Nussbaum’s class in 1967 when Wilson was a new graduate student. “I thought his lectures were a model of clarity and precision,” said Wilson, Ph.D., professor emeritus of mathematics.
Nussbaum’s mathematic expertise was unbounded operators on Hilbert spaces and related topics. Hilbert spaces are a generalization of familiar two- and three-dimensional spaces to n-dimensional spaces and then on to infinite dimensional vector spaces.
The vectors can be sophisticated entities, such as functions and differential or integral operators. Hilbert spaces arise naturally in mathematics, physics and engineering and are indispensible tools in quantum mechanics, signal processing and a host of other topics.
Nussbaum was introduced to this area of study by the famous mathematician John von Neumann, who coined the term Hilbert space. Nussbaum worked with von Neumann on an electronic computer project at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton while Nussbaum was finishing a doctorate at Columbia University in New York.
He earned a master’s degree in mathematics in 1950 and a doctorate in 1957, both from Columbia.
He was a Holocaust survivor who escaped Nazi Germany and, after many harrowing experiences, made his way to New York in 1947.
Nussbaum’s father, Karl, his mother, Franziska, and his brother, Erwin, all died in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland.
Nussbaum and his sister, Liselotte, escaped to Belgium on a Kindertransport train in 1939, when he was 14, but Belgium then was overrun by the Nazis and he was forced to flee again, first to Vichy France and then, on foot, to Switzerland.
“Ed never spoke about his ordeal or the fate of his family,” said David Wright, Ph.D., chair and professor of mathematics. “He didn’t seem haunted; he was always smiling, very friendly.”
“He was a kind, gentle and compassionate man,” said Guido Weiss, Ph.D., the Elinor Anheuser Professor of Mathematics in Arts & Sciences.
Nussbaum is survived by Anne, his wife of 52 years, a daughter, Franziska Suzanne Nussbaum of St. Louis, and a son, Karl Erich Nussbaum of New York City.
The family asks that memorial contributions be made to a charity of the donor’s choice.