Bruria Kaufman

Bruria Kaufman was born in 1918 in New York City

Bruria Kaufman was born in New York City in 1918 to a Jewish family of Ukrainian origin. Her father, Yehuda Even Shmuel, was a scholar of Jewish studies. The family moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1926, where she studied in Tel Aviv at the Herzliya Gymnasium and was drawn to music and mathematics.

She earned a B.Sc. in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1938 and a PhD from Columbia University in 1948. In 1941 she married the linguist Zellig Harris.

From 1948 to 1955 she was a research associate at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working with John von Neumann and with Albert Einstein from 1950 until his death. She wrote papers with Einstein and co-authored his book on relativity. In 1949 she and Lars Onsager found a solution to the two-dimensional Ising model based on group theory.

She returned to Israel in 1960, lived on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, and was a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science until 1971 and later at the University of Haifa until 1988. With Harry Zvi Lipkin she studied the Mössbauer effect. In 1965 she was appointed to the board of the Broadcasting Authority.

In 1982 she moved back to the United States, and after Harris died in 1992 she moved to Arizona. In 1996 she married the physicist Willis Lamb, a marriage that ended in divorce. She later returned to Israel and died in 2010.