The works of Professor Gregory Poltyrev are related to various aspects of Shannon Theory and source coding, channel coding and error control coding for recording. He coauthored (with V.D. Kolesnik) four books, among them the book entitled A Course of Information Theory, Moscow, Nauka publ., 1982, which is comparable in its level and in-depth coverage to Gallager's Information Theory and Reliable Communication. He authored/coauthored 27 refereed publications - 19 in the USSR and 8 in the west, out of which 5 appeared in the IEEE IT Transactions. Gregory possesses a remarkable talent for understanding and focusing attention on the essentials.
For many years the reputation of Gregory Poltyrev was confined to the Soviet Union and the eastern block. He became particularly well known in the west when he showed that the capacity region of the frame-asynchronous multiple-access channel is the same as the capacity region of the synchronous multiple-access channel apart from the convex hull operation ("Coding in an asynchronous multiple-access channel," Prob. Peredachi Inform., vol. 19, pp. 12-21, July/Sept. 1983), two years prior to the publication of the same result in the west by two well-known authors.
Professor Poltyrev succeeded in conducting research and publishing papers even in the disheartening atmosphere of the last seven years of his stay (1982-89) in the former Soviet Union, a period in which he was deprived by the authorities of regular contact with fellow researchers. Upon his arrival in Israel, he experienced the ordinary difficulty of learning a new language and getting accustomed to an entirely new environment at an advanced age. Nonetheless, he succeeded in a relatively short period of time in renewing his research activity and publishing several excellent papers, in English and mostly in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Within a couple of years he started to deliver his lectures in Hebrew, and became highly regarded by the students for his precise yet inspiring presentations. He is esteemed by his colleagues for his scholarly conduct and his friendly attitude.
