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'''Sergei Natanovich BERNSTEIN'''

b. 22 February 1880 (o.s.) -  d. 26 October 1968

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'''Summary''' Bernstein's training in and continuing contacts 
with Paris led him to combine
analytical writing with the traditions of the St.Petersburg School in 
probability. Martingale
differences appear in his work, and best known are his extensions of the 
Central Limit Theorem
to weakly dependent random variables.

Bernstein was born in Odessa in the then Russian Empire.  His father was 
a doctor
and university lecturer, and the family was Jewish, with the attendant
difficulties.  On completing high school Bernstein went to Paris for his
mathematical education, and defended a doctoral dissertation in pure mathematics in 1904 at the
Sorbonne.  He returned in 1905 and taught at Kharkov University from 1908 to 1933;
the system of czarist universities, and possibly his Jewishness, made it necessary
to defend another doctoral dissertation in pure mathematics in 1913.  Jerzy Neyman 
(q.v.) recollects lectures at Kharkov University in 1915 or 1916 by Bernstein on 
probability, and that it was Bernstein who suggested to him that he read Karl 
Pearson's ''Grammar of Science''. Clearly, given Neyman's influence on the 
direction of mathematical statistics subsequently, Bernstein was influential in this
sense also, quite apart from his many and striking contributions to probability theory.

After the revolution Bernstein became professor at Kharkov University, and became
active in the Soviet reorganization of tertiary institutions, as a national commissar
for education, for example in the establishment in Kharkov  of the All-Ukrainian
Scientific Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences in 1928.  During the
quickly-suppressed period of Ukrainianization within the time when Kharkov
(Kharkiv in Ukrainian) was capital (1919-1934) of the Ukrainian SRS, he refused to use the 
Ukrainian language, although there is a publication of his in 1928 (on the concept
of correlation between statistical variables) written in this language.  This would 
have put him at variance with the chairman (1927-1933) of national commissars for 
education of Ukraine, M.V. Skrypnyk (1872-1933, who under Stalinist pressure
committed suicide), and mathematicians such as M.P. Kravchuk (q.v.).

Possibly finding Markov's (q.v.) ''Ischislenie Veroiatnostei'' dated as a didactic aid,
Bernstein produced an elegant
textbook ''Teoriia Veroiatnostei'' which first appeared in 1927, went to 2nd and
3rd editions in 1934, with a final 4th edition in 1946.  There were substantial
changes in the successive editions, and the 4th edition contains a significant amount
of new research material, especially on his own incomplete axiomatization of
probability, and on inhomogeneous Markov chains.  He was very familiar with the
probabilistic work of the Petersburg School and wrote a splendid commentary on
Chebyshev's (q.v.) probabilistic work in 1945 and can well be thought of as succeeding
Liapunov (who left it in 1902) at Kharkov University.  Even though the origins of the
Petersburg direction themselves were largely under French influence due to 
Buniakovsky and Chebyshev, Bernstein's own training in and contact with Paris, 
shown in his heavily analytical writing, helped him combine its manifestation with 
then-current European thinking.  The scope of his probabilistic work in general was
ahead of its time, and his writings, including his book, helped significantly to 
shape the development of probability, and not only in the USSR.

Berstein took a keen interest in the methodology of teaching mathematics at secondary
and tertiary levels, and popularizing its use.  His official bibliography of about 
265 items contains numerous book reviews and articles in ''Pedagogicheskii Sbornik''
in prerevolutionary years, and after in journals such as ''Nauka na Ukraine'', for 
example an article in 1922 entitled "On the application of mathematics to biology".
These activities doubtless contributed to his appointment as a national commissar for
education, and, at least in the years prior to 1933, helped to further the standing 
of mathematics.

From 1933 Bernstein worked at the Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of
Sciences in Leningrad (now again called St. Petersburg), and also taught at the
University and Polytechnic Institute. From January, 1939, Bernstein worked also
at Moscow University. He and his wife were evacuated to Kazakhstan before
Leningrad was blockaded by German Armies from September 8, 1941 to January, 1943. 
From 1943 he worked at the Mathematical Institute in Moscow.

In the years 1952-1964 he spent much time in the editing and publication of the
four-volume collection of his mathematical works, which contains commentaries by his 
students and experts in various fields.  The first 3 volumes deal with essentially 
non-probabilistic themes.  The 4th volume is entitled "Theory of Probability and 
Mathematical Statistics [1911-1946]''.  One problem to which he kept returning was the 
accuracy of the normal approximation to the normal distribution.  In fact a theme of
his work was reexamination in a new light of the main existing theorems of probability 
theory, such as extension to dependent random variables of the Weak Law of Large Numbers. 
(This law deals with conditions under which the sample means ${\bar X}_n = (X_1 + X_2 +
\cdots + X_{n})/n$ formed from a sequence $\{X_{n}\}$ of random variables converge in 
probability to a constant, as  $n$  increases.) The characterization of the normal 
distribution through independence of linear forms in two
random variables is usually referred to as  Bernstein's Theorem.  The name Bernstein's
Inequality has its origin in a paper of 1924 and is applied to a number of inequalities,
the most common of which is $P(X \geq a) \leq e^{-at} M(t)$, for $t > 0$, 
where $ M(t)=E(e^{Xt}) $. (This follows 
immediately from Markov's Inequality.) 

Little known (although
partly translated into English) is a surprisingly advanced (for its time, 1924)
mathematical investigation in population genetics, involving a synthesis of Mendelian
inheritance and Galtonian "laws" of inheritance. 

The idea of martingale differences appears in his work; and probably best-known are
his extensions of the Central Limit Theorem to ``weakly dependent random variables". 
The classical limit theorems (the Weak Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit
Theorem) are concerned with the probabilistic behaviour as $n \rightarrow \infty$ of the
partial sums $\{S_{n}\}$  where $ S_n=X_1+X_2+...+X_n $ of a sequence of $\{X_{n}\}$ of "independent'' random variables
with zero mean $(E X_n = 0)$.  For the more general concept of a ''martingale 
difference'' sequence of random variables $\{X_{n}\}$ , the property $E(X_n | X_{n-1} ,
X_{n-2} , \cdots, X_1) = 0$ is retained.  These are Bernstein's "first order dependent 
random variables".  Since $X_n = S_n - S_{n-1}$ , this defining property can be formulated 
as $E(S_n - S_{n-1} | S_{n-1} , S_{n-2}, \cdots, S_1) = 0$. The sequence $\{S_{n}\}$ of
partial sums is now called a "martingale''. It has the property $E(S_n | S_{n-1} , \cdots, 
S_1) = S_{n-1}$ and the sequence $\{X_{n}\}$ is thus one of "martingale differences".

For the statistician especially, of interest is a paper of 1941 entitled "On the 
"fiducial" probabilities of Fisher."

The  Bernstein polynomials have a number of uses in probabilistic contexts. 

Bernstein's
students included G.A. Ambartsumian, V.P. Savkevich, O.V. Sarmanov, H.A. Sapogov.  
An epitaph which he might have chosen for himself preceded a prize-winning work of his (1911):

<blockquote>
La vie est brève 

Un peu de rêve 

Un peu d'espoir 

Et puis bonsoir.
</blockquote>


====References====
{|
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|1}}||valign="top"|   Bernstein, S.N. (1964). ''Sobranie Sochinenii'' (Collected Works, 4 vols.) Gostehizdat, Moscow-Leningrad. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|2}}||valign="top"|   Bogoliubov,A.N. (1997). Serhiy Natanovych Bernshtein (1880-1968). In: ''Instytut  Matematyky. Narysy Istorii.'' '''17''', 175-189. [In Ukrainian.] Published by: Instytut Matematyky Ukr. AN, Kyiv. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|3}}||valign="top"|   Kolmogorov, A.N. and Sarmanov, O.V. (1960). On the writings of S.N. Bernstein on the theory of probabilities. [in Russian]. ''Teoriia Veroiatnostei i ee Primeneniia'', '''5''', 215-221. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|4}}||valign="top"|   Reid, C. (1982). ''Neyman - from life.'' Springer, New York. 
|-
|valign="top"|{{Ref|5}}||valign="top"|   Seneta, E. (1982). Bernstein, Sergei Natanovich. ''Encyclopedia of Statistical  Sciences'' (S. Kotz and N.L. Johnson, eds.) Wiley, New York '''1''', 221-223.
|-
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<references />

Reprinted with permission from
Christopher Charles Heyde and Eugene William Seneta (Editors),
Statisticians of the Centuries, Springer-Verlag Inc., New York, USA.

[[Category:Statprob]]
[[Category:Biographical]]