Nikolai Bugaev

Nikolai Vasilievich Bugaev (1837 to 1903) was a Russian mathematician, born in Dusheti in what is now Georgia, who built his career at Moscow University. Sent to Moscow at the age of ten, he entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in 1855, defended a master's thesis on the convergence of infinite series in 1863, and then spent two and a half years studying under Kummer and Weierstrass in Berlin and Liouville in Paris. His doctoral thesis of 1866 dealt with numerical identities associated with the number e, and he was appointed professor at Moscow University in 1867. His research lay mainly in analysis and number theory, where he drew an analogy between operations in number theory and differentiation and integration, and developed a systematic theory of discontinuous functions that he called arithmology. His pupils included Dmitri Egorov and Nikolai Sonin, and Egorov's 1911 theorem is seen as marking the beginning of the Moscow school of the theory of functions of a real variable. Bugaev was also a founder of the Moscow Mathematical Society and its president from 1891.