Otto M. Nikodym

Otto Marcin Nikodym (3 August 1887 – 4 May 1974) was a Polish mathematician. He was born in 1887 in Demycze, a suburb of Zabłotów, to a family with Polish, Czech, Italian and French roots.[1] Orphaned at a young age, he was brought up by his maternal grandparents. He studied mathematics at the University of Jan Kazimierz (UJK) in Lvov (today's University of Lviv). Immediately after his graduation in 1911, he started his teaching job at a high school in Kraków where he remained until 1924. He eventually obtained his doctorate in 1925 from the University of Warsaw; he also spent an academic year (1926-1927) in Sorbonne. Nikodym taught at the Universities of Kraków and Warsaw and at the Akademia Górnicza in Kraków in the years that followed.

Otto M. Nikodym
Otto Nikodym and Stefan Banach Memorial Bench in Kraków, Poland (sculpted by Stefan Dousa)
Born	(1887-08-03)3 August 1887 Zabolotiv, Galicia
Died	4 May 1974(1974-05-04) (aged 86) Utica, New York, United States
Nationality	Polish
Known for	Radon–Nikodym theorem
Scientific career
Fields	Mathematics
Institutions	Kenyon College

In 1924, he married Stanisława Nikodym, the first Polish woman to obtain a PhD in mathematics. They moved to the United States in 1948 and joined the faculty of Kenyon College. He retired in 1966 and moved to Utica, New York, where he continued his research and eventually died.

Nikodym worked in a wide range of areas, but his best-known early work was his contribution to the development of the Lebesgue–Radon–Nikodym integral (see Radon–Nikodym theorem).[2] His work in measure theory led him to an interest in abstract Boolean lattices. His work after coming to the United States centered on the theory of operators in Hilbert space, based on Boolean lattices, culminating in his The Mathematical Apparatus for Quantum-Theories. He was also interested in the teaching of mathematics.