Person: Grigelionis, Bronius
Bronius Grigelionis was a Lithuanian mathematician who worked in the theory of random processes and their statistics.
Mathematical Profile (Excerpt):
- His parents, Ignas Grigelionis (1894-1973) and Ona Valeikaitė (1905 - 1986), were traditional farmers.
- When Ignas Grigelionis was young, he participated in the Lithuanian Wars of Independence as a partisan and was awarded two medals (Order of Vytautas Didysis and Order of Independence).
- When it was time for Bronius to start school, Ignas and Ona were wealthy enough to pay for his education.
- So Bronius, together with his other siblings, attended Vaškai primary school.
- Before starting his schooling Bronius had already learnt how to read and count, so his teacher advised him to entry directly into second grade.
- In 1940 Russia occupied Lithuania and Bolsheviks began repressions against teachers and intelligentsia (educated people): one teacher from Bronius's school was deported to Siberia, and another was executed.
- The Germans visited farms (including Bronius's home) and nationalized their property, such as animals or crops.
- When Bronius was asked about the moment he realized he had a talent for mathematics, he said that he felt extremely thankful for his teachers.
- According to Bronius, at Žeimelis High School which he entered in 1949, he had a wonderful mathematics teacher Motiejus Gudynas who used to give separate tasks for students according to their abilities.
- He noticed that Bronius and his friend Vincentas Dienys (now Dr. habil.
- In 1954 Bronius graduated from Žeimelis High School with a Silver Medal (the second highest honour in the Soviet Union).
- While studying, Bronius became a mathematics tutor for younger students who were struggling with the subject.
- While reading the book Bronius became very curious about probabilistic number theory and later wrote his first scientific paper The distribution of values of arithmetic multiplicative functions (Lithuanian) (which was published in 1960) for his bachelor's thesis.
- Bronius continued his education as a post-graduate student.
- When Gnedenko returned to the Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1960, Bronius had to go with him to Moscow.
- Bronius had a great opportunity to participate in various special mathematical courses and scientific seminars, where he gained knowledge about superharmonic functions and supermartingales.
- Bronius was interested in studying the theory of probability, measure and integral theory and mathematical statistics.
- In total Bronius published five papers that year, all written in Russian, on topics such as the limit theorem and Poisson processes.
- At that time Bronius became extremely interested in the theory of random processes and modern probability theory, so he continued his research on these topics and in 1966 he published On the Stefan problem and optimal stopping rules for Markov processes (Russian).
- It is worth mentioning, that Bronius was the youngest habilitated doctor in Lithuania at that time.
- Officially Bronius only became a member of Lithuanian Academy of Sciences in 1987.
- In the meantime Bronius was actively involved in research, lecturing, and organising various seminars.
- Since Grigelionis was always sceptical about communism, the idea of being independent was very appealing and he became the only academician on the council of the organisation.
- As a lecturer, Grigelionis was especially liked by his students.
- According to his former student Vilijandas Bagdonavičius (born 1949), Grigelionis was very concise and emphasized the importance of proofs.
- In total nineteen of Grigelionis' students defended their PhD thesis and six of them became habilitated doctors.
- Nowadays you can meet former Grigelionis students giving lectures at almost every international conference on random processes and probability theory.
- Grigelionis always had strong moral principles and was patriotic.
- Besides his scientific career, he never forgot about his native area Pasvalys and together with his colleague Antanas Apynis was keen on organizing mathematics olympiads where young mathematicians from Pasvalys would strive to win the Cup of Grigelionis.
Born 1 April 1935, Iciūnai, near Vaškai, Lithuania. Died 23 May 2014, Vilnius, Lithuania.
View full biography at MacTutor
Tags relevant for this person:
Origin Lithuania
Thank you to the contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0! 
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- @Leticija-Dubickaite
References
Adapted from other CC BY-SA 4.0 Sources:
- O’Connor, John J; Robertson, Edmund F: MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
