a country he had come to love during his stay there in the 1920s, and asked Hardy for help in getting a position. Mean-while, an offer arrived from Solomon Lefschetz, who was the first Jewish professor to have been hired by Princeton, and Hardy encouraged Bochner to accept the offer rather than to try to stay in England, which was rapidly becoming overcrowded with German academic refugees. Bochner accepted the offer and left for America alone, becoming an “associate” at Princeton for the 1933-1934 year and an assistant professor starting in 1934.

During the 1930s he would travel every summer to Germany to visit his family, and in 1938 he helped his family immigrate to England and get properly settled. It was on one of these voyages that he met Naomi, his wife-to-be, an American traveling to Europe on a vacation. They were married on Thanksgiving Day in 1938, with John von Neumann as best man. After their marriage the Bochners developed lifelong friendships with Marston Morse and his wife, Louise, as well as with Eugene Wigner and his wife, Mary.

Bochner was promoted to associate professor in 1939 and to professor in 1946. During this period in his life, Bochner was a part-time member of the Institute for Advanced Study for 1945-1948, a lecturer at Harvard for the spring semester of 1947, a consultant to the Los Alamos Project in Princeton in 1951, and for 1952-1953 a visiting professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1959 Bochner was appointed Henry Burchard Fine Professor of Mathematics, and he held that position until his mandatory retirement from Princeton in 1968. He was then immediately appointed E. O. Lovett Professor of Mathematics at Rice University, a position he held until his death in 1982. For the interval 1969-1976 he was chairman of the department. The atmosphere at the two institutions was