In a recent short biography of Ernst Nagel, Yvonne Nagel mentioned the meeting of Nagel and Hosiasson in Warsaw during his stay there in the fall of 1934. She wrote:

Ernest also enjoyed meeting a younger couple—Janina Hosiasson and her fiancé the mathematician Adolf Lindenbaum. (A)

I have always placed the beginning of Janina and Adolf’s engagement much later than the fall of 1934, so this was news. When I asked Yvonne for the exact source of her assertion, she quoted a letter that Nagel wrote from Warsaw to his friend Sidney Hook, relating having met a certain Ms Hosiasson and her fiancé, who was a mathematician. No name of said fiancé was given. But in the context of what has been published about Hosiasson and Lindenbaum so far, it was a reasonable conclusion to draw: here we have some mathematician referred to as Janina’s fiancé, and she did end up marrying a mathematician by the end of the following year—so the man mentioned in the letter must be Lindenbaum.

But I could not shake the feeling that something in here was not hanging together with everything else I knew about Janina’s life.

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