Born Sept. 4, 1848, in Berlin; died Sept. 23, 1919, in Leipzig. German astronomer, geodesist, and mathematician. Member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences (1906).
Bruns worked as a calculator at the Pulkovo Observatory from 1872 to 1873, and later (1873-76) as an observer at the Iur’ev Observatory. From 1882 he was director of the observatory and professor at the University of Leipzig. He developed a theory on the earth’s shape, worked out the problem of many bodies in celestial mechanics, wrote several books on probability theory and mathematical treatment of observations, and invented the theory of interpolation of statistical material, based on Chebyshev’s polynomials.