Born: 11 June 1909, Russia
Died: 3 February 2003
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Natascha Jasny
Russian-American mathematician and photographer Natascha Artin Brunswick was born in Sain Petersburg, but her father fled to Tbilisi following the October Revolution in 1917, with the rest of the family following in 1920. They later lived in Austria before settling in Germany, where she took up photography and later earned a mathematics degree from the University of Hamburg. Before graduating, she married a professor more than a decade her senior. Because she was ethnically Jewish (her mother had converted to marry her father), the couple and their children left Germany for the United States in 1937 with the rise of Nazism in Germany.
Despite being classified as an “enemy alien” during World War II, the US Army nonetheless hired her to teach soldiers Russian in 1942. Although never a professional photographer, she was an avid and talent hobbyist, but her camera was confiscated due to her “enemy alien” status. Even once it was returned, she never took back up her art. But decades later, her son discovered a collection of prints from 1930s Hamburg scenes and architecture, and they were first exhibited in 1999, with hundreds of her prints now in the collection of the city’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe.
Moving to Princeton, New Jersey, in 1946, she got involved with the mathematics department of New York University, becoming the technical editor of the journal Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics in 1948. From 1956 until 1989, she was the primary translation editor for the journal Theory of Probability and Its Applications. She divorced her first husband in 1958, later remarrying a composer.