Biography
Rudin was born into a Jewish family in Austria in 1921. They fled to France after the Anschluss in 1938. When France surrendered to Germany in 1940, Rudin fled to England and served in the British navy for the rest of the war. After the war he left for the United States, and earned his B.A. from Duke University in North Carolina in 1947, and two years later earned a Ph.D. from the same institution. After that he was a C.L.E. Moore instructor at MIT, briefly taught in the University of Rochester, before becoming a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He remained at the University for 32 years. His research interests spanned from harmonic analysis to complex analysis. He received an honorary degree from the University of Vienna in 2006. His Erdős number is 2.
In 1953, he married fellow mathematician Mary Ellen Estill. The two resided in Madison, Wisconsin, in the eponymous Walter Rudin House, a home designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. They had four children.
Rudin died on May 20, 2010 after suffering from Parkinson's disease.
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