pandas assign with new column name as string

You can pass the keyword arguments to assign as a dictionary, like so:

kwargs = {"ln(A)" : lambda x: np.log(x.A)}
df.assign(**kwargs)

    A         B     ln(A)
0   1  0.500033  0.000000
1   2 -0.392229  0.693147
2   3  0.385512  1.098612
3   4 -0.029816  1.386294
4   5 -2.386748  1.609438
5   6 -1.828487  1.791759
6   7  0.096117  1.945910
7   8 -2.867469  2.079442
8   9 -0.731787  2.197225
9  10 -0.686110  2.302585