When a young friend who recently returned from a visit to Nazi concentration camps thanked Simcha Brudno for the first-hand Holocaust stories that inspired the trip, Mr. Brudno deflected the credit.
“Don’t thank me, thank Hitler,” he said.
A Lithuanian Jew who lost both his parents and scores of extended family during World War II, Mr. Brudno never lost a passion for science, justice and wry, blunt wit, friends and family said.
“He had an unusual sense of humor, but it was always dead on,” said Adam Reinherz, who visited the camps. “He made you stop and think.”
A survivor of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany who became a mathematician, Mr. Brudno, 82, died Friday, June 9, at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge of respiratory and heart failure. He had lived in Chicago.
Born into a prosperous Lithuanian clan, he and his family were relocated to a Jewish ghetto in 1941 when Mr. Brudno was a teen. In 1944 they were shipped to Dachau. Though his mother died in a gas chamber, Mr. Brudno’s strength and willingness to work kept him alive.
“They knew they had a worker there and that saved him,” said George Anastaplo, a Loyola University law professor who is writing a book about Mr. Brudno’s Holocaust experience.
After liberation, Mr. Brudno moved to Palestine, where he joined the army and fought for the creation of Israel. He later studied mathematics at Hebrew University and at the Weizmann Institute of Science, but never earned a college degree, said his closest surviving relative, nephew Edward Nachman.
Mr. Brudno immigrated to the United States in 1960 and worked as a math researcher at Florida State University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and, finally, the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, friends and family members said.
He published many papers packed with intricate mathematical theory, including, for example, the laboriously titled “On Generating Infinitely Many Solutions of the Diophantine Equation A (circ) 6 + B (circ) 6 + C (circ) 6 = D
