Background
Nierenberg was born on February 13, 1919, at 213 E. 13th Street, on the Lower East Side of New York, the son of very poor Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungary. He went to Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York (CCNY), where he won a scholarship to spend his junior year of university abroad, in France at the University of Paris. He entered graduate school at Columbia University in 1939, but spent the war years from 1942 seconded to the Manhattan Project, working on isotope separation, before returning to Columbia to complete his PhD.
Read more about this topic: William Nierenberg
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