Otto Nikodym was born on 13 August 1887 in city of Zablatow in the Glacia region of Austria Hungary (now in the Ukraine). He received a doctoral degree in mathematics from the University of Warsaw in 1910. During his career, Nikodym held academic positions at the Jagiellonian University and the Technical University of Krakow. He immigrated to the United States in 1948, teaching at Kenyan College in Ohio. Nikodym died on 4 May 1974 in Utica, New York.
Otto Nikodym made important contributions in functional analysis, measure theory, topology, and other areas. He authored several books on differential equations, mathematical physics, and tensor theory. Nikodym is best known for generalizing a theorem of Johann Radon on the existence of a density function (or derivative) of one measure with respect to another. The Radon-Nikodym theorem is of fundamental importance in probability in terms of the existence of probability density functions and conditional expected values.