Quick Facts
Biography
Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko (Russian: Бори́с Влади́мирович Гнеде́нко; January 1, 1912 – December 27, 1995) was a Soviet mathematician and a student of Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov. He was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), Russia, and died in Moscow. He is perhaps best known for his work with Kolmogorov, and his contributions to the study of probability theory, particularly extreme value theory, with such results 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 (published 1946) 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 (published 1992). In 1958 he was a plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Edinburgh with a talk entitled "Limit theorems of probability theory".
Books
- with A. N. Kolmogorov: Limit distributions for sums of independent random variables (trans. and annotated by K. L. Chung). 1954.
- with A. Ya. Khinchin: An elementary introduction to the theory of probability (trans. by Leo F. Boron). Mineola, N.Y.: Dover. 1962.
- The theory of probability (trans. by George Yankovsky). Moscow: MIR. 1969.
- with Yu. K. Belyayev and A. D. Solovyev: Mathematical methods of reliability theory (trans. by Scripta Technica; trans. ed. by Richard E. Barlow). NY: Academic Press. 1969.
- with I. N. Kovalenko: Introduction to queueing theory (trans. by Samuel Kotz). Boston: Birkhauser. 1989.
- Darling, Donald A. (1956). "Review: Limit distributions for sums of independent random variables by B. V. Gnedenko and A. N. Kolmogorov" (PDF). Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 62 (1): 50–52. doi:10.1090/s0002-9904-1956-09978-1.