Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko

Who was Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko?

Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko was a Soviet mathematician and a student of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov. He was born in Simbirsk, Russia, and died in Moscow. He is perhaps best known for his work with Kolmogorov, and his contributions to the study of probability theory, such as the Fisher–Tippett–Gnedenko theorem. Gnedenko was appointed as Head of the Physics, Mathematics and Chemistry Section of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 1949, and also became Director of the Kiev Institute of Mathematics in the same year.

Gnedenko was a leading member of the Russian school of probability theory and statistics. He also worked on applications of statistics to reliability and quality control in manufacturing. He wrote a history of mathematics in Russia and with O. B. Sheynin the section on the history of probability theory in the history of mathematics by Andrei Kolmogorov and Adolph P. Yushkevich. In 1958 he was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh with a talk entitled "Limit theorems of probability theory".