Victor Brumberg

Victor A. Brumberg (born February 12, 1933) is a Russian theoretical physicist specializing in relativistic celestial mechanics and astrometry. He worked as a chief-scientist at the Institute of Applied Astronomy, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg. He is noted for his work on general relativity applied to celestial mechanics and ephemerides. He is currently living in the United States of America.

Brumberg has served on the scientific committees for projects under the IAU Commission 4: Ephemerides, Commission 7: Celestial Mechanics & Dynamical Astronomy (President), Commission 31: Time, and Commission 52: Relativity in Fundamental Astronomy. He is also a member of the Academy of Europe. Until 2005, he served as Assistant Editor of the Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy Journal. He held visiting positions at the Observatoire de Paris (1991), National Astronomy Observatory of Japan (1992-1993), Tuebingen Technical University (1993-1994), Bureau des Longitudes, and Darmstadt Technical University (2000).

Brumberg has over 100 publications and 6 books, two of which are the highly influential Essential Relativistic Celestial Mechanics (1991) and Analytic Techniques of Celestial Mechanics (1995).

He received the 2008 Brouwer Award from the Division of Dynamic Astronomy of the American Astronomical Society. The Brouwer Award was established to recognize outstanding contributions to the field of Dynamical Astronomy, including celestial mechanics, astrometry, geophysics, stellar systems, galactic and extragalactic dynamics.

Contributions to celestial mechanics

One major contribution to the three body problem was Brumberg's construction of a series of polynomials converging for any real time moment. Brumberg also worked on the theory of special functions of celestial mechanics and perturbation theory, constructing compact analytic theories in purely trigonometric forms.

Brumberg's main contribution was in the formation, development, and use of the general theory of relativity in celestial mechanics. He was the leading developer of methods for recording relativistic effects in the motion of celestial bodies, the propagation of light, and in optical and radio observations. He showed that the relationship between calculated and observed quantities is independent on the choice of coordinates as long as the calculations and observations are with respect to the same coordinate system. Brumberg was also one of the creators of a unified relativistic theory of the motion of planets, a necessary step for the generation of Russian experiments in space. He received the USSR State Prize for this work. In 1994-1997, Brumberg led a group of the IAU that discovered inaccuracies in the IAU resolutions of 1991, and subsequently recommended more accurate implementations of relativistic report systems that were approved in 1997.

Main-belt asteroid 4916 Brumberg, discovered at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory in 1970, was named in his honor. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 18 August 1997 .