Aumann was born in Frankfurt am Main , Germany , and fled to the United States with his family in 1938 , two weeks before the Kristallnacht pogrom . He attended the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School , a yeshiva high school in New York City . He graduated from the City College of New York in 1950 with a B.Sc . in Mathematics . He received his M.Sc . in 1952 , and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1955 , both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . His doctoral dissertation , '' Asphericity of Alternating Linkages '' , concerned knot theory . His advisor was George Whitehead , Jr . In 1956 he joined the Mathematics faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has been a visiting professor at Stony Brook University since 1989 . He has held visiting professorship at the University of California , Berkeley ( 1971 , 1985 – 1986 ) , Stanford University ( 1975 – 1976 , 1980 – 1981 ) , and Universite Catholique de Louvain ( 1972 , 1978 , 1984 )
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Robert Aumann