In memoriam Professor Jindřich Nečas (December 14, 1929 -- December 5, 2002) (Q851567)

On December 5, 2002, a prominent Czech mathematician Professor RNDr.\ \textit{Jindřich Nečas}, DrSc., died after a long illness at the age of seventy-three years. \textit{Jindřich Nečas} was born in Prague on December 14, 1929. Since 1932 he lived in the nearby town of Mělník, where he graduated from the secondary school in 1948. Then he studied mathematics at the Faculty of Science of the Charles University in Prague during 1948--1952. After a one year period at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague he started a postgraduate study at the Mathematical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. His supervisor, Prof.\ \textit{Ivo Babuška}, influenced him to solve problems occurring in physics and engineering. In 1956 \textit{J.\ Nečas} obtained the scientific degree of Candidate of Science (an equivalent of PhD) and became a research worker of the Mathematical Institute. He also worked at the Faculty at Mathematics and Physics of the Charles University in 1965--1972 as the head of the Department of Mathematical Analysis. In 1977 he passed from the Academy of Sciences to the Charles University and headed the Department of Mathematical Modeling. The most important contributions of J. Nečas belong to the theory of partial differential equations and to nonlinear functional analysis. Since the very beginning J.\ Nečas devoted great effort to applications in mathematical physics and engineering. In 1967 he founded a seminar on the problems of continuum mechanics which has not ceased working up to this time.