Walter Rudin (1921–2010)

Walter Rudin was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. His parents were Natalie (Adlersberg) and Robert Pollack von Rudin, an electrical engineer and inventor. He also had a younger sister, Vera. Following Nazi Germany's Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, Walter and his sister were sent to school in Switzerland. He attended the Institut auf dem Rosenberg in St. Gallen for six months. After that, his parents arrived, and when they saw they could not stay in the country, managed to obtain visas for France. With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Walter and his father were sent to the Meslay-du-Maine internment camp. Walter escaped to St. Jean-de-Luz on the Atlantic coast, and from there got a boat to England. There he joined the Pioneer Corps, responsible for light engineering tasks. In 1944, when the Royal Navy needed interpreters, especially native German speakers, Rudin joined up. After the war, he and the rest of his family emigrated to the USA. He earned both his B.A. in 1947 and Ph.D. in 1949 in mathematics from Duke University in North Carolina. He was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at MIT and completed his first book, the now-classic Principles of Mathematical Analysis (1953). He taught at the University of Rochester before becoming a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1959. He was later appointed to a Vilas Professorship, which he held until he retired in 1991. That same year, he published his autobiography, The Way I Remember It, and another classic text for graduate courses, Functional Analysis. In 1993, Prof. Rudin was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition from the American Mathematical Society for his skill as a writer. In 1953, he married fellow mathematician Mary Ellen Estill, known for her work in set-theoretic topology, with whom he had four children. They lived in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.