Jan Vlachy has died

[Andrea Scharnhorst]

Jan Vlachy was for many years the (executive) editor of the Czechoslovak Journal of Physics, and it was due to this function that I first got in contact with him as a student when publishing a first article on modeling science 1986 together with my professor Werner Ebeling. Jan was also of great help for follow up publications insisting than we should use a lot of diagrams and not only equations, and really taught me how to do them, so that scientometricians could understand.

He always was a researchers with a visual talent, who could express very clearly basic trends, laws, structures in graphs and diagrams. But what most impressed me when I first had the ability to meet him in Prague and discuss things with him at home were long lists of very accurately written down long lists of numbers on paper (!) (I talk about 1985). I always thought that there is no scientometric data, no possibility to count items/attributes related to scientific publications Jan Vlachy would not have already explored by himself.

Working for the journal he published a lot a smaller studies encompassing very interesting, and still actual, problems of scientometrics. I just looked up the springer website, and it seems that they have inbetween archived the whole journal and a lot of his material in there is available.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/0011-4626/?k=Vlachy

But, I also still think is would be valuable to have an archive of his papers (not only the once in The Czech J Phys) on-line for the community. The last time I saw him after many years and with great pleasure again was at the Leiden conference, and we spoke about that he should make his publications on-line available. He agreed but I  don't recall if he had only a plan to do this or if this plan was a bit more mature. As Loet, I also heard him talking about re-opening a series of workshops in Prague on bibliometrics again, and having a first meeting in 2011.
It is a great loss ....

Andrea

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of Loet Leydesdorff
Sent: Thursday, November 25, 2010 8:50 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Jan Vlachy has died

Yes, Jan was a very nice colleague.

I met him first at a meeting in Bielefeld shortly after the tumbling of the Berlin wall, organized by Peter Weingart at the ITZ as a meeting with Eastern-European colleagues (who we did not know in person until then). I remember that I arrived late in the evening after a long day with education and everything was dark. Then, I saw someone behind a window who reacted to my waiving and he invited me for tea and goat cheese. These were the only things he was eating. Later I understood that Jan always brings his own food. He usually traveled by car with a lot of food in the trunk.

Jan's strength was that he had marvelous control over the data. He gave the impression that he had filed all the paper copies in one of these castles in Bohemia. We met over the years irregularly; he told me the last time - at the meeting in September in Leiden - that he had sometimes given up on the field because of the weight that the bureaucrats in Brussels sometimes lay on their methods of evaluation. "They have invested so much in error, that they cannot back off." They once hired him Brussels for three months, but I don't believe that this was the happiest period in his life.

I know that he was planning a workshop in Prague, in March 2011 or so. I promised to attend.
We will miss him.

Best wishes,
Loet

________________________________
Loet Leydesdorff
Professor, University of Amsterdam
Amsterdam School of Communications Research (ASCoR),
Kloveniersburgwal 48, 1012 CX Amsterdam.
Tel.: +31-20- 525 6598; fax: +31-842239111
loet at leydesdorff.net <mailto:loet at leydesdorff.net> ; http://www.leydesdorff.net/

From: ASIS&T Special Interest Group on Metrics [mailto:SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu] On Behalf Of Enrique Wulff
Sent: Wednesday, November 24, 2010 10:20 AM
To: SIGMETRICS at listserv.utk.edu
Subject: Re: [SIGMETRICS] Jan Vlachy has died

His contribution:
"Information Science and Science Studies (An Experience of 1965-1992)"
[FID 46th Conference and Congress. Madrid, 22-30 October 1992]
should be remembered.
With respects,
Enrique Wulff Barreiro.




At 18:04 23/11/2010, you wrote:
I was informed by a colleague from Prague that Jan Vlachy, the Czech physicist and winner in 1989 of the Derek Price Medal in Scientometrics has died in Berlin.

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Eugene Garfield, PhD. email:  garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu<mailto:garfield at codex.cis.upenn.edu>
home page: www.eugenegarfield.org<http://www.eugenegarfield.org/>
Tel: 610-525-8729 Fax: 610-560-4749


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