ARS MATHEMATICA CONTEMPORANEA
Vladimir Batagelj is 7G
Vladimir Batagelj, known as Vlado to his friends, is one of the most prolific Slovenian scientists. Although he has a PhD in mathematics and has worked most of his active life at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Ljubljana where he is now Professor Emeritus, he has very broad research interests and a passion for teaching. Over ten years before obtaining his PhD, Vlado published a solo paper on quadratic hash method in the distinguished journal Communications of the ACM. When I was a graduate student of computer science at Penn State, one of our textbooks cited his paper. I was very proud to tell my fellow graduate students that Vlado and I attended the same courses as undergraduates. Actually, during compulsory military service we shared a room in barracks in Zagreb for a year.
Vlado's scientific work has been cited over 11000 times in Google Scholar; over 5400 times since 2013. His most cited work,
with over 3300 citations, is his book Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, written together with W. de Nooy and A. Mrvar. The book was also translated into Chinese and Japanese. The revised and expanded 3rd edition of this successful textbook was published by Cambridge University Press this year. Pajek is a highly successful, freely available software package for large networks analysis, authored by Vlado and his former PhD student Andrej Mrvar and used widely in social sciences.
Vlado is one of the pioneers of discrete mathematics and theoretical computer science in Slovenia, who chartered his academic course on his own and works on problems that he finds interesting. Nevertheless, he understands the vital need for a nation of 2M to receive fresh knowledge in its own language. Vlado is the author of over 20 textbooks in Slovenian, covering a wide range of topics, from TEX to Combinatorics and Discrete Mathematics.
Vladimir Batagelj
Exploratory Social Network Analysis with Pajek, 3rd Edition
Vlado, I wish you a very happy birthday and many more productive years! Tomo (Tomaž Pisanski)
xi