Editor's Note: The author, Otto Neugebauer, is remembered for various contributions to mathematics, but none greater than his convincing the publisher Springer-Verlag, in 1931, to put out an abstracting journal, Zentralblatt für Mathematik und ihre Grenzgebiete, that would cover all of mathematics. This journal ended up supplanting the earlier Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik, which was published between 1868 and 1942, and with the increase in the number of published papers had, by the time of its demise, fallen hopelessly behind schedule and was no longer very useful to research mathematicians. The database for the Jahrbuch has subsequently been incorporated into Zentralblatt.

Neugebauer became the first editor of the new journal. With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Springer had to follow the party line and restrict the reviewing of work by Jewish mathematicians, so Neugebauer, on the invitation of Harald Bohr, moved to Copenhagen in 1933, taking the offices of Zentralblatt with him. With much of Europe being taken over by the Germans, Neugebauer had to move to the United States in 1939—but not before destroying the Zentralblatt records (except for the cumulative index). In the U.S. he took a position at Brown University. During the Second World War, with Zentralblatt only sporadically available in the Allied countries and the content of the journal no longer determined by mathematical criteria alone, Neugebauer proposed that the American Mathematical Society publish an abstracting journal in the United States, Mathematical Reviews.