George Adams was born the son of the Australian-German industrialist Georg von Kaufmann and the Englishwoman Mary Adams in Mariampolé in Lithuania, which was then Russian. Between 1912 and 1918, he studied chemistry (B.A.) and mathematics (M.A.) at the University of Cambridge, where he intensively explored the works of Whitehead and Russell. When he asked Russell how one could arrive at useful approaches in theoretical physics without the atomic hypothesis, he advised him to study projective geometry.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Ziegler|first=Renatus|date=|title=George Adams Kaufmann|url=https://dokumentationen.kulturimpuls.org/biografien/16|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2024-04-01|website=Stiftung Kulturimpuls}}</ref> | George Adams was born the son of the Australian-German industrialist Georg von Kaufmann and the Englishwoman Mary Adams in Mariampolé in Lithuania, which was then Russian. Between 1912 and 1918, he studied chemistry (B.A.) and mathematics (M.A.) at the University of Cambridge, where he intensively explored the works of Whitehead and Russell. When he asked Russell how one could arrive at useful approaches in theoretical physics without the atomic hypothesis, he advised him to study projective geometry.<ref>{{Cite web|last=Ziegler|first=Renatus|date=|title=George Adams Kaufmann|url=https://dokumentationen.kulturimpuls.org/biografien/16|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=2024-04-01|website=Stiftung Kulturimpuls}}</ref> |