The 1961 Russian monograph and its 1962 English translation credited all four Soviet co-authors on the book itself, even as the already-fixed convention named only Pontryagin's "principle"

pontryaginboltyanskiigamkrelidzemishchenkomaximum-principlecredit-attributionbibliographysoviet-unionhistory-of-mathematics

Gamkrelidze's 2019 Steklov-Proceedings paper cites, in its own reference list, both the Russian original — "L. S. Pontryagin, V. G. Boltyanskii, R. V. Gamkrelidze, and E. F. Mishchenko, The Mathematical Theory of Optimal Processes (Fizmatgiz, Moscow, 1961) [in Russian]" — and its 1962 Interscience English translation, each carrying the same four names in the same order: L.S. Pontryagin, V.G. Boltyanskii, R.V. Gamkrelidze, and E.F. Mishchenko. On this citation evidence, the book, in both its Russian original and its first English translation, carried all four authors' names from the start. His 2003 chapter, by contrast, cites no monograph at all: its maximum-principle references are the precursor journal publications — the 1956 Doklady announcement and the 1960 Izvestiya paper "The Theory of Optimal Processes I. The Maximum Principle" — each credited to three authors in the order Boltyanski, Gamkrelidze, Pontryagin, with Pontryagin listed last and Mishchenko absent. So even the pre-monograph journal record carried multi-author credit (in what appears to be alphabetical order), never a single name.

This means the West did not inherit a flattened credit — a result stripped down to one name on its way across the Iron Curtain. It inherited the same two-tier convention already fixed inside the Soviet Institute before translation (claim-boltyanskii-testimony-locates-pontryagin-naming-convention-in-internal-soviet-pressure): the book, and the 1962 Lenin Prize it carried, credited four names; the principle, as a named mathematical object, carried one. The asymmetry between a jointly authored monograph and a singly named theorem narrows what "the West only learned Pontryagin's name" can mean: Western readers encountering the English translation saw all four names on the same page where they saw "the maximum principle" attributed, by convention, to Pontryagin alone.

Caveat. This capture did not view the 1962 book's own title page directly — the four-name fact rests on the reference list of a single later paper by Gamkrelidze himself (2019), one hand, not an independent confirmation. (An earlier version of this note claimed two of Gamkrelidze's papers cited the monograph consistently; the 2026-11-06 audit found the 2003 chapter cites only the three-author precursor articles — see audit_status.)