With luck and his wits, Eddie Nussbaum escaped at age 14 from Nazi Germany. Most members of his family were killed.

Years later, in the U.S., he followed a boyhood dream of becoming a mathematician, and taught at Washington University for 37 years.

A. Edward Nussbaum died of congestive heart failure on Saturday (Oct. 31, 2009) at Barnes-Jewish Hospital. He was 84 and lived in Clayton.

Mr. Nussbaum's parents owned a department store in Germany. With war coming, they sent their three children away.

Mr. Nussbaum's brother was arrested in 1938 during the Kristallnacht, or Night of the Broken Glass, an anti-Jewish pogrom in which 25,000 people were sent to concentration camps.

His brother was released, fled to Holland, was arrested again and sent to Auschwitz and was never heard from again. Mr. Nussbaum's parents also died in that Nazi death camp in Poland.

Mr. Nussbaum and his sister were luckier — they were sent via Kinder Transport train to relocate in Belgium, where they were separated. His sister survived the war and later became a Christian missionary in Africa. Mr. Nussbaum fled from Belgium to southern France. When that also became unsafe, he crossed illegally into Switzerland with the help of two women and their woodsman father.

The Swiss threw him in jail, where he made up a story that got him freed. He lived with a spinster and her nephew, and studied mathematics at the University of Zurich.

In 1947, he took a ship to the U.S. He was 22 and found a job rolling clay surfaces at a tennis court. He enrolled in Brooklyn College, later earning a master's degree and a Ph.D. in mathematics at Columbia University.

At Princeton, N.J., he worked on early computers, riding to work in a car with Albert Einstein.

In 1957, relatives introduced him to Anne Ebbin. Her interests didn't include math, and her family in Staten Island, N.Y., was religious, while Mr. Nussbaum was not.

He invited her on a drive to Atlantic City, N.J., but got lost in his Pontiac convertible and they ended up in Manhattan. They married a few months later.

"We basically felt the same about life," she recalled, although she said she never did understand his work.

The next year, a friend invited them to St. Louis, and he took a job at Washington University, teaching until 1995.

In 1989, the couple were part of a group of 160 Jews who traveled to Moenchengladbach (pronounced moon-chen-GLOD-bock), Germany, Mr. Nussbaum's hometown. They saw old friends and their old homes, now with strangers living in them.

The mayor, who was born after the war, sobbed as he told them their homeland was irretrievably gone and that he was ashamed.

The funeral will be at 1 p.m. today at United Hebrew Cemetery in University City.

Survivors, in addition to his wife, include a daughter, Franziska Suzanne Nussbaum of St. Louis; and a son, Karl Erich Nussbaum of New York City.

Memorial contributions may be made to a charity of the donor's choice.