ZbMATH Open
abstracting and reviewing service for mathematical literature
zbMATH Open, formerly Zentralblatt MATH, is a major reviewing service providing reviews and abstracts for articles in pure and applied mathematics, produced by the Berlin office of FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure GmbH. Editors are the European Mathematical Society, FIZ Karlsruhe, and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. zbMATH is distributed by Springer Science+Business Media. It uses the Mathematics Subject Classification codes for organising reviews by topic.
History
Mathematicians Richard Courant, Otto Neugebauer, and Harald Bohr, together with the publisher Ferdinand Springer, took the initiative for a new mathematical reviewing journal. Harald Bohr worked in Copenhagen. Courant and Neugebauer were professors at the University of Göttingen. At that time, Göttingen was considered one of the central places for mathematical research, having appointed mathematicians like David Hilbert, Hermann Minkowski, Carl Runge, and Felix Klein, the great organiser of mathematics and physics in Göttingen. His dream of a building for an independent mathematical institute with a spacious and rich reference library was realised four years after his death. The credit for this achievement is particularly due to Richard Courant, who convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to donate a large amount of money for the construction.
The service was founded in 1931, by Otto Neugebauer as Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete.
The public source identifies “ZbMATH Open” as abstracting and reviewing service for mathematical literature. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around ZbMATH, abstracting and reviewing.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q190269. VIAF identifies the subject as 293226396. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “ZbMATH Open” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.