Michael Golomb was an American mathematician and educator who was affiliated with Purdue University for over half a century. He was a student of Erhard Schmidt and Adolf Hammerstein, and received his doctorate from the University of Berlin in 1933. However, as a Jew, he had to leave Germany shortly afterwards to avoid Nazi persecution. After a short period in Zagreb in the former Yugoslavia, Michael Golomb arrived in the U.S. in 1939, when he turned to applied mathematics. He was one of the first mathematicians to apply normed vector spaces in numerical analysis. He taught mathematics at Purdue University from 1942 until his retirement in 1975, at times holding joint appointment with the Schools of Engineering. He continued to teach as Professor Emeritus.