On July 2, 2005, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kondrat'ev, Honored Professor of Moscow State University, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences), celebrated his seventieth birthday.Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kondrat'ev was born in Samara (earlier Kuibyshev), Russia, on July 2, 1935. His father was Professor of mechanics at Kuibyshev Industrial Institute, and his mother was a teacher of mathematics in a secondary school. In 1952, Kondrat'ev graduated from school no. 6 of Kuibyshev with excellence and entered the Mechanical-Mathematical Department of Moscow State University; in 1957, he graduated from the university. In 1959, a year before finishing postgraduate studies, he defended his Ph.D. thesis "On Zeros of Solutions of Linear Differential Equations of Order > 2" supervised by Professor S.A. Gal'pern, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences; in 1965, Kondrat'ev defended his D.Sc. thesis "Boundary Value Problems for Elliptic and Parabolic Equations with Singularities on the Boundary." Kondrat'ev's scientific interests were formed under the great influence of Academician I.G. Petrovskii. Since 1961, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kondrat'ev has been working as Assistant Professor of the Chair of Differential Equations at the Mechanical-Mathematical Department of Moscow State University, and since 1970, he has been Professor of this chair.The main directions of Kondrat'ev's research are the following: the investigation of the oscillation property of solutions of ordinary differential equations; elliptic equations in domains with corners and conical points; qualitative and asymptotic properties of solutions of linear and nonlinear elliptic and parabolic equations and systems; spectral problems of differential operators; estimates for the minimum eigenvalue of differential operators; asymptotic behavior of solutions of ordinary differential equations with operator coefficients and qualitative properties of weak solutions of elliptic boundary value problems; analysis of mathematical problems of elasticity.Kondrat'ev's first scientific results were obtained during the study at the university and deal with the investigation of the oscillation property of solutions of linear ordinary differential equations. He justified a nonoscillation criterion for solutions of a second-order linear differential equation and 0012-2661/05/4107-0909 c 2005 Pleiades Publishing, Inc.