Sergei Alexandrovich Amber

Sergei Alexandrowitsch Bernstein , Russian Сергей Александрович Бернштейн , (born April 26, 1901 in Moscow , † April 26, 1958 ibid) was a Russian civil engineer.

He was the son of the psychiatrist Alexander Nikolajewitsch Bernstein (1870-1922) and brother of the physiologist Nikolai Alexandrowitsch Bernstein and nephew of the mathematician Sergei Natanowitsch Bernstein .

After completing his schooling at Moscow's 9th Gymnasium, Bernstein studied from 1918 to 1921 at the physics-mathematics faculty of Moscow State University - specializing in pure mathematics - and then switched to construction at the Moscow University of Transportation Systems , which he graduated by 1926. While still a student, Bernstein worked in the bridge testing office of the scientific-technical committee at the People's Commissariat for Traffic Routes, where he worked until 1932 and held various positions from technician to office manager. Bernstein brought the experience Bernstein gained in the experimental investigation of large structures under natural conditions to the laboratory for steel structures of the Central Research Institute for Industrial Construction (ZNIIPS), which he directed from 1935 to 1937.

From 1929 Bernstein taught structural mechanics at Moscow universities, from 1932 at the Kuibyshev Military Engineering Academy . In 1938 he defended his doctoral dissertation (habilitation), a new method of determining the oscillation frequencies of elastic systems, and in the same year was appointed head of the chair for strength theory at the military academy of tank and motorized troops of the Soviet Army. He worked here until the summer of 1957, when a serious illness forced him to retire.

Bernstein's complete scientific work ranges from work on the statics and dynamics of spatial bridge systems through plastic calculation methods and building dynamics to his monograph on the history of building mechanics (1957). In the last-mentioned work, Bernstein dealt in four extensive essays with the theoretical history of strength theory, vaults, trusses and continuous beams; He concludes his volume of essays with an extensive bibliography.

Bernstein dealt with building dynamics and the development of measurement methods and the implementation of measurements on railway bridges throughout the Soviet Union. He wrote textbooks on building dynamics and strength theory and statically indeterminate systems and in 1957 a book on the history of structural engineering and strength theory with which he advanced to become a pioneer of the historiography of structural engineering in the USSR. He was also a brilliant teacher.

literature

• Karl-Eugen Kurrer : The History of the Theory of Structures. Searching for Equilibrium , Ernst & Sohn 2018, p. 5 and p. 970f (biography), ISBN 978-3-433-03229-9

Fonts

• Essays on the history of building mechanics (Russian), Moscow 1957
• Selected works on building mechanics (Russian), Moscow 1961

Web links

• Russian biography