Mark Semenovich Pinsker or Mark Shlemovich Pinsker was a noted Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n mathematician in the fields of information theory

Information theory

Information theory is a branch of applied mathematics and electrical engineering involving the quantification of information. Information theory was developed by Claude E. Shannon to find fundamental limits on signal processing operations such as compressing data and on reliably storing and...

, probability theory

Probability theory

Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena. The central objects of probability theory are random variables, stochastic processes, and events: mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic events or measured quantities that may either be single...

, coding theory

Coding theory

Coding theory is the study of the properties of codes and their fitness for a specific application. Codes are used for data compression, cryptography, error-correction and more recently also for network coding...

, ergodic theory

Ergodic theory

Ergodic theory is a branch of mathematics that studies dynamical systems with an invariant measure and related problems. Its initial development was motivated by problems of statistical physics....

, mathematical statistics

Mathematical statistics

Mathematical statistics is the study of statistics from a mathematical standpoint, using probability theory as well as other branches of mathematics such as linear algebra and analysis...

, and communication networks.

Pinsker studied stochastic processes under A. N. Kolmogorov in the 1950s, and later worked at the Institute for Information Transmission Problems (IITP), Russian Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

, Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

.

His accomplishments included a classic paper on the entropy

Entropy

Entropy is a thermodynamic property that can be used to determine the energy available for useful work in a thermodynamic process, such as in energy conversion devices, engines, or machines. Such devices can only be driven by convertible energy, and have a theoretical maximum efficiency when...

 theory of dynamical systems which introduced the maximal partition with zero entropy, later known as Pinsker's partition. His work in mathematical statistics was devoted mostly to the applications of information theory, including asymptotically sufficient statistics for parameter estimation and nonparametric estimation. He also produced notable results in the theory of switching networks and complexity problems in coding theory.

Pinsker received the IEEE Claude E. Shannon Award

Claude E. Shannon Award

The Claude E. Shannon Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society was instituted to honour consistent and profound contributions to the field of information theory. Each Shannon Award winner is expected to present a Shannon Lecture at the following IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory...

 in 1978, and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1996.

Selected works

• "Theory of curves in Hilbert space with stationary increments of order " Izv. Akad. Nauk SSSR Ser. Mat., 19, 1955.
• Information and information stability of random variables and processes, translated and edited by Amiel Feinstein, Holden-Day, San Francisco, 1964.
• L. A. Bassalygo and M. S. Pinsker, "The complexity of an optimal non-blocking commutation scheme without reorganization", Problemy Peredaci Informacii, 9(1):84-87, 1973. Translated into English in Problems of Information Transmission, 9 (1974) 64-66.
• M. S. Pinkser. "On the complexity of a concentrator", 7th International Teletraffic Conference, pages 318/1-318/4, 1973.
• "Estimation of error-correction complexity of Gallager low-density codes", Problems of Information Transmission, 11:18—28, 1976.
• "Reflections of Some Shannon Lecturers".http://www.itsoc.org/publications/nltr/98_dec/10ref.pdf

External links

• "Mark Semenovich Pinsker. In Memoriam", Problems of Information Transmission, MAIK Nauka/Interperiodica, Volume 40, Number 1 / January, 2004, pages 1–4. ISSN 0032-9460. English version http://www.springerlink.com/content/x11351131v785g4w/fulltext.pdf
• Ramesh Rao. " Mark Semenovich Pinsker - On his 70th Birthday", IEEE Information Theory Society
  IEEE Information Theory Society
  The IEEE Information Theory Society , formerly the IEEE Information Theory Group, is a professional society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers focused on several aspects of information: its processing, transmission, storage, and usage; and the "foundations of the...
  
   Newsletter, September 1995.
• Sasha Barg. "In Memoriam - Mark Semënovich Pinsker", IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, Volume 54, Number 3, September 2004.
• Pinsker Marks Shlemovich (1925–2003) author page at Math-Net.ru.