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Nikolai Aleksandrovich Bernstein (1896 – 1966) was a Russian neurophysiologist and a member of the USSR academy of science, whose contribution to motor control and learning is still discovered today. Primarily invested in the understanding of how manual worker performances could be improved, and in the biomechanics and physiology of human locomotion, Bernstein identified the inverse dynamics problem — by which multiple muscular activation patterns can produce the same movement — and its solution, through the reduction of the numerous and redundant mechanical degrees of freedom of the human body, known today as the Bernstein’s problem. His ideas and concepts, touching various domains — dexterity, development, coordination, among many others — were born behind the iron curtain in the first part of the 20th century (from 1920 to 1950), but were popularized worldwide at the end of the sixties by the publication in english of his main book.

Bernstein, N.A. (1967). The co-ordination and regulation of movements. Oxford : Pergamon Press.