Lev Bregman

Lev M. Bregman (1941 to 2023) was a Soviet and Israeli mathematician best known for the Bregman divergence, which bears his name. He took his master degree at Leningrad University in 1963 and his doctorate there in 1966 under J. V. Romanovsky, with a thesis on relaxation methods for finding a common point of convex sets that led to one of his best-known publications. Bregman theorem, which proved a 1963 conjecture of Henryk Minc, gives an upper bound on the permanent of a 0-1 matrix. He was a senior researcher at Leningrad University from 1966 to 1991, then spent a year at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and worked at the Institute for Industrial Mathematics in Beer-Sheva, Israel. He wrote several textbooks and dozens of papers in international journals.