Sergei Natanovich Bernstein was born in Odessa, Ukraine on March 5, 1880. When he was 18 years old, Sergei went to Paris to study mathematics at the Sorbonne. In 1904 he published his doctoral thesis, on analytic solutions to differential equations of second order. He moved to Kharkiv, Ukraine in 1908 where he submitted his thesis Investigation and Solution of Elliptic Partial Differential Equations of Second Degree for a Master’s degree that would qualify him for a professorship in Russia. This paper provided solutions to the 19th and 20th Problems that were proposed by Hilbert in 1900 as the mathematical challenges for the new century.
While Bernstein made significant contributions in approximating solutions to differential equations using polynomials, he also contributed to the field of probability theory and its application to heredity. In 1932 Bernstein left Kharkov to become head of the Department of Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics of the Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. Though Bernstein received many awards from the government of the USSR, he also received censure for opinions that ran contrary to Soviet doctrine. In 1939 he was given a lecturing post at Moscow University, but was dismissed 8 years later from the University and assigned to the Department of Constructive Function Theory at the Steklov Institute.
