Acta Polytechnica


doi:10.14311/AP.2013.53.0007
Acta Polytechnica 53(5), 2013 © Czech Technical University in Prague, 2013

available online at http://ojs.cvut.cz/ojs/index.php/ap

THREE QUARTERS A CENTURY

Foreword to Special Issue Dedicated to Prof. Miloslav Havlíček

Such a number of years makes one think, as the famous phrase in Some Like
it Hot goes. In cases like the jubilee that this Festschrift celebrates, there
is indeed a lot to think about, because the life of Professor Miloslav Havlíček
has been anything but boring. This is clear already from his curriculum. One
of the first graduates of the newly-founded Faculty of Technical and Nuclear
Physics in 1961, he started his mathematical career teaching algebra. At
the same time, he worked on applications of algebraic methods in quantum
theory, under the strong influence of Professor Václav Votruba, the nestor
of Czech theoretical physics.

Infinite-dimensional Lie algebras were the topic of his PhD thesis, and
algebraic problems have remained his favourite subject throughout his life.
However, his interests have been broader than that. He has dealt with
problems in functional analysis, differential equations, foundations of quantum
mechanics, and other topics.

Since 1973, he has spent several years at the Laboratory of Theoretical
Physics, JINR, in Dubna, where he also wrote and defended his higher doctoral thesis on Canonical Realizations,
a certain algebraic representation theory of Lie algebras. Back in Prague, he worked at Charles University, but
in the second half of the 1980s his research came under pressure from those who wielded power but had no
understanding, and he decided to return to the Department of Mathematics of his alma mater.

The great political rift of 1989 changed his life. In particular, it removed the obstacles that had prevented him
from obtaining the academic laurea that he deserved. He obtained his habilitation in 1990, and three years later
he became a full professor. In 1990, he was also elected dean of the faculty, and he served in this capacity for
two terms; he was the principal spiritus movens in the transformation of the faculty to the conditions of a free
society. One of his memorable achievements was to found the Doppler Institute, which cemented and boosted
the existing informal collaboration of several groups working on mathematical physics in Prague.

These are the dry facts. However, we who have known him for about two thirds of his present age can testify
that there is much more in Miloslav. His professional – and not only professional – life has been ornamented
by an array of stories too numerous to be told in this short preface. Some are anecdotal, like the story of his
doctoral thesis being confiscated by a Soviet border guard, who suspected subversion in a text on Lie algebras.
Some are rather complex, like the story of our textbook on linear operators in quantum physics, tenderly
known as Blue Death by our students, which started out four decades ago as a lecture note project to utilize
an orphaned chapter of a manuscript, passed through years of reworking under the eye of mean editors, and
through administrative hurdles so typical for certain periods in the history of this country, not to mention the
bankruptcy of a publishing house, to achieve one Czech edition and two English editions with three different
publishers – and who knows where it will go from here.

It is a good custom in our field that we honour a colleague and a teacher as he celebrates a jubilee by putting
forward some results which, we think, might please him. In this volume, we have collected short papers from
Miloslav’s friends, collaborators and students, in the hope that he will enjoy them.

Pavel Exner

http://dx.doi.org/10.14311/AP.2013.53.0007
http://ojs.cvut.cz/ojs/index.php/ap

	Acta Polytechnica 53(5), 2013