Natascha Artin Brunswick

• Name — Natascha Artin Brunswick • Birth Name — Natalya Naumovna Yasnaya • Born — 11 June 1909 • Birthplace — Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire • Died — 3 February 2003 • Place of death — Princeton, New Jersey, US • Education — University of Hamburg • Spouse — * Emil Artin, • Mark Brunswick

Natascha Artin Brunswick was the daughter of Naum Jasny, a Russian Jewish economist from Kharkiv. Her mother was a Russian orthodox aristocrat and dentist. Since at the time Russian orthodox Christians were prohibited from marrying Jews, she converted to Protestantism. They were married in Finland. Her father Naum Jasny was an adherent of the Mensheviks and fled to Tbilisi after the October Revolution in 1917. Natascha, her sister, and her mother followed in 1920. After the Bolsheviks took control of Georgia, the family lived in Austria from 1922 to 1924, for a brief period in 1924 in Berlin, and finally moved to Langenhorn, Hamburg, where they remained until 1937. Natascha Jasny attended the progressive Lichtwark school. While still in school, she photographed with a simple box camera and processed her own pictures in the bathroom at home, which served as a makeshift darkroom. Natascha graduated in 1928. She hoped to study architecture at the Bauhaus Dessau, but the family's financial situation made this impossible. She instead studied mathematics at the University of Hamburg, where she also took courses in art history from Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky. She graduated from the university in 1930 with a Magister degree. On August 29, 1929 she married her mathematics professor Emil Artin, who had been teaching in Hamburg since 1923. In 1933, the Artins had a daughter, Karin, and in 1934 a son, Michael. Because his wife was of Jewish descent, Emil Artin was forced into early retirement from his teaching position under the Nazi Party Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. On September 27, 1934, Artin already had to sign a declaration that his wife was not "Aryan". The Artin family managed to leave Germany for the United States on October 21, 1937. Since they were prohibited from taking larger sums of money with them, the Artins shipped their entire household, which reflected their modernist sensibilities.

Natascha's husband first obtained a teaching position at the University of Notre Dame, and in 1938 moved to Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. The Artins had their third child, son Thomas (Tom), in 1938. During World War II, Natascha Artin was classified an enemy alien. The United States Army nevertheless hired her in 1942 to teach Russian to soldiers under Army Specialized Training Program at Indiana University. In 1946, Emil was hired by Princeton University, and the Artins moved to Princeton, New Jersey. They divorced in 1958, after which Emil Artin returned to Hamburg. Natasha Artin remarried in 1960. Her second husband was composer Mark Brunswick. She lived in Princeton until her death in 2003.

After her move to Princeton, Natascha Artin joined the group around Richard Courant at the mathematics department of New York University. She became the technical editor of the journal Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, founded at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1948, and in 1956 became the primary translation editor for the journal Theory of Probability and Its Applications, a position she held until 1989. In recognition of her long-standing membership of over 50 years, she was made an Honorary Member of the American Mathematical Society.