Remembering Walter Rudin (1921–2010)

W alter Rudin, Vilas Professor Emeritus at the University of WisconsinMadison, died on May 20, 2010, at his home in Madison after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was born in Vienna on May 2, 1921. The Rudins were a well-established Jewish family which began its rise to prominence in the first third of the nineteenth century. By the 1830s, Walter’s great-grandfather, Aron Pollak, had built a factory to manufacture matches; he also became known for his charitable activities, including the construction of a residence hall where seventy-five needy students at the Technical University in Vienna could live without paying rent. As a result, Aron was knighted by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1869 and took the name Aron Ritter Pollak von Rudin. The Rudin family prospered, and Walter’s father, Robert, was a factory owner and electrical engineer, with a particular interest in sound recording and radio technology. He married Walter’s mother, Natalie (Natasza) Adlersberg, in 1920. Walter’s sister, Vera, was born in 1925. After the Anschluss in 1938, the situation for Austrian Jews became impossible, and the Rudin family left Vienna. Walter served in the British Army and Navy during the Second World War, and rejoined his parents and sister in New York in late