Born Dec. 4 (16), 1804, in Bare, Podolia Province; died Nov. 30 (Dec. 12), 1889, in St. Petersburg. Russian mathematician. Member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1830; adjunct from 1828) and its vice-president (1864-89).
Buniakovskii received his mathematical education in Paris. He and M. V. Ostrogradskii and P. L. Chebyshev played an important role in raising the scholarly level in teaching mathematics with the extensive Lexicon of Pure and Applied Mathematics (vol. 1, published in 1839) and arithmetic textbooks for secondary schools (1844 and 1849). Buniakovskii’s works deal with specific problems in analysis, the theory of inequalities (for example, Buniakovskii’s inequality), number theory, and probability theory. (In Principles of the Mathematical Theory of Probability, 1846, Buniakovskii gave an original exposition of this theory and its application to insurance and demography.) Buniakovskii was the government’s chief expert on problems of statistics and insurance.