Mathematicians Richard Courant, Otto Neugebauer, and Harald Bohr, together with the publisher Ferdinand Springer, took the initiative for a new mathematical reviewing journal.

His dream of a building for an independent mathematical institute with a spacious and rich reference library was realised four years after his death.

The credit for this achievement is particularly due to Richard Courant, who convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to donate a large amount of money for the construction.

It contained the bibliographical data of all recently published mathematical articles and book, together with peer reviews done by mathematicians over the world.

Some of the mathematical abstracts were written by famous mathematicians such as Felix Klein, Sophus Lie, Richard Courant, or Emmy Noether.

[7] The Zentralblatt MATH abstracting service provides reviews (brief accounts of contents) of current articles, conference papers, books and other publications in mathematics, its applications, and related areas.

Zentralblatt MATH is now edited by the European Mathematical Society, FIZ Karlsruhe, and the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.

The database also incorporates the 200,000 entries of the earlier similar publication Jahrbuch über die Fortschritte der Mathematik from 1868 to 1942, added in 2003.