On the genesis of approximation theory with special emphasis on the contributions of the St. Petersburg Mathematical School around P. L. Chebyshev (Q2736191)

Chebyshev has been the subject of a number of historical and mathematical studies, for example \textit{P. Butzer} and \textit{F. Jongmans} [J. Approximation Theory 96, 111-138 (1999; Zbl 0934.01017)]. Nevertheless the present thorough study fills a gap in the early history of approximation theory centering on Chebyshev and his students. In addition to straightforwardly wrong facts in recent literature (the proof of the alternation theorem, for example, is wrongly credited to Chebyshev in some recent accounts), otherwise reliable early Soviet Russian accounts sometimes had a certain nationalist bias that tended to make the Chebyshev school appear even more isolated from western European developments than it was. Likewise, the few non-Russian language accounts focused mainly on the St. Petersburg school and tended not to put it in a wider context. There is apparently also an ongoing difficulty in accessing original materials in the St. Petersburg university archives. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEThe work begins with a brief account of approximation notions in Euler and Laplace. The main focus is on Chebyshev and his St. Petersburg students (A. N. Korkin, E. I. Zolotarev, A. and V. A. Markov, J. K. Sochocki, K. A. Posse). This is followed by developments outside of Russia (F. Klein, P. Kirchberger, E. Borel, J. W. Young, L. Fejér, C. Runge, D. Jackson). Further developments in Russia shifted the center of gravity to Char'kov in the Ukraine where A.-B. P. Psheborskij helped to begin the career of S. N. Bernstein who, with his background of study with D. Hilbert and F. Klein, enabled the melding of modern (Weierstrassian) analytic methods with the Chebyshev school's method resulting in constructive theory of functions. NEWLINENEWLINENEWLINEAppendices include brief biographies of members of the St. Petersburg school, translations into German of several letters of Chebyshev relating to his travels to England and France in 1852, and transcriptions of letters from Bernstein to Hilbert from 1905 to 1910.