A conversation with Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko

Boris Vladimirovich Gnedenko, Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukranian SSR, and Head of the Department of Probability Theory at the Moscow State University, turned 80 on January 1, 1992. He is internationally acclaimed as one of the outstanding mathematicians in the field of Probability Theory. He was a graduate student under the direction of A. Ya. Khinchin and A. N. Kolmogorov, with whom he also developed a close personal friendship. In the spring of 1991 he visited George Washington University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The following interview, about his life and mathematical work, took place in Washington, D.C., on May 25, 1991. Apart from Gnedenko himself, present were Nozer Singpurwalla, of George Washington University, Richard Smith, from Chapel Hill, Gnedenko’s son Dimitri, who is also a probabilist at the Moscow State University, and Igor Ushakov from Moscow, visiting George Washington University. The following material on Gnedenko’s contributions to statistical science has been abstracted from tributes paid to Gnedenko on his 50th, 60th and 70th birthdays respectively, by Belyaev, Gikhman, Kolmogorov, Korolyuk and Solov’ev, and published in Uspekhi Math Nauk [English translation: Russian Mathematical Surveys]. © 1992, Institute of Mathematical Statistics. All Rights Reserved.