Mark Semenovich Pinsker

Who was Mark Semenovich Pinsker?

Mark Semenovich Pinsker or Mark Shlemovich Pinsker was a noted Russian mathematician in the fields of information theory, probability theory, coding theory, ergodic theory, mathematical statistics, and communication networks.

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

His accomplishments included a classic paper on the entropy 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 in 1978, and the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 1996.