Ilya Nikolaevich Bronshtein
Soviet mathematician
Ilya Nikolaevich Bronshtein (Russian: Илья Николаевич Бронштейн, German: Ilja Nikolajewitsch Bronstein, also written as Bronschtein; born 1903, died 1976) was a Russian applied mathematician and historian of mathematics.
Work and life
Bronshtein taught at the Moscow State Technical University (MAMI), then the State College of Mechanical Engineering, on the Chair of Advanced Mathematics established in 1939. He also collaborated at the Zhukovsky Central Aerohydrodynamic Institute.
With Dmitrii Abramovich Raikov, Bronshtein authored a Russian handbook on elementary mathematics, mechanics and physics (Справочник по елементарнои математике, механике и физике), which was published in 1943.
Bronshtein is known as the author of a handbook of mathematics for engineers and students of technical universities, which he wrote together with Konstantin Adolfovic Semendyayev around the 1939/1940 timeframe. Hot lead typesetting for the work had already started when the Siege of Leningrad prohibited further development and the print matrices were relocated. After the war, they were first considered lost, but could be found again years later, so that the first edition of Справочник по математике для инженеров и учащихся втузов could finally be published in 1945. This was a major success and went through eleven editions in Russia and was translated into various languages, including German and English, until the publisher Nauka planned to replace it with a translation of the American Mathematical Handbook for Scientists and Engineers by Granino and Theresa M. Korn in 1968.
However, in a parallel development starting in 1970, the so called "Bronshtein and Semendyayev" (BS), which had been translated into German in 1958, underwent a major overhaul by a team of East-German authors around Günter Grosche, Viktor & Dorothea Ziegler (of University of Leipzig), to which Bronshtein himself could no longer contribute due to reasons of age. This was published in 1979 and spawned translations into many other languages as well, including a retranslation into Russian and an English edition.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29054042. VIAF identifies the subject as 47213830. The Library of Congress control number is n82107902. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1903, 1976, 1939 and 1943.
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