Sergi Bernstein was born in Odessa in the Ukraine on March 5, 1880. He was educated at the Sorbonne, earning a doctorate in 1904. Bernstein returned to Russia, earning another doctorate at the University of Khrakov in 1917. During his career, he taught at the University of Khrakov, Leningrad University, and the University of Moscow.
To students of analysis and probability, Bernstein is best known for the polynomials that bear his name, which uniformly approximate a given function that is continuous on a closed, bounded interval. He also worked on the foundations of probability theory, generalizations of the central limit theorem, and Markov processes