ActaChimicaSlovenica
Memorial Issue
In Memory of the Academician, Prof. Dr. Ljubo Golic
(1932-2007)
It came hard on us that Professor Golic came to the end of his very fruitful life in the beginning of July 2007 just after his 75th birthday. He was the first-class scientist, highly recognized and thoroughly respected in the international scientific and crystallographic community, persistently promoting the development of chemical and structural crystallography, not only in Slovenia, but his scientific work had a great impact on neighbouring university centres in Croatia, Austria, Italy, and Germany.
Almost fourty years ago he was a founder of regular annual crystallographic conferences, organized at that time by the so-called Yugoslav Centre of Crystallography, acting under the auspices of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, Croatia. That
was the association gathering crystallographers in the former state of Yugoslavia. Professor Golič attended most of those meetings, discussing vigorously crystal-lographic matters, as well as many other topics, among which the climbing of mountain peaks in the Alps deserved really a special attention.
In 1974 Professor Golič succeded to obtain the automatic X-ray diffractometer in Ljubljana, to install the instrument, to create a modern X-ray laboratory and to gather a group of young coworkers. That was the first instrument of that kind in the South-East Europe beyond the Iron curtain, and that event had a tremen-deous impact on the development of crystallography as well as computing in Slovenia and also in the neighbouring countries. We all remember the PDP8 computer with DE32K memory disk. Those were the pioneer days of ALGOL and FORTRAN programming and punched card technology. Professor Golič was aware of the great advantage of the computer-supported automatic diffractometer very soon, in comparison to the tiresome and time-consuming old film techniques. Eor his scientific and teaching activity Professor Golič received the highest scientific awards in Slovenia.
Scientific investigations in crystallography in the former state and regular annual conferences were recognized by the European crystallographic community. That was the decisive fact to choose Ljubljana as the venue of the 13 th European Crystallographic Meeting in 1991. Professor Golič was the Chair of the Organizing Committee for that Meeting, and the Secretariat Office of the Meeting acted in Ljubljana. Unfortunately, the attack of the Yugoslav army on Slovenia in June 1991 and later on Croatia pressed the organizers to announce that the meeting would take place in Trieste instead, only two months before the meeting date. The change of the venue in such a short time was
a very difficult task for Professors Golic and Boris Kamenar and his colleagues in the Organizing Committee, but with their tremendeous effort the ECM-13 was successfully organized with the generous help of Italian crystallographic friends in Trieste.
After desintegration of Yugoslavia, Professors Ljubo Goli~, Boris Kamenar, Stanko Popovi~ and myself gathered in the spring of 1992 in the castle of Mokrice, Slovenia, and decided to continue annual crystallographic gatherings, now as bilateral Slovenian-Croatian meetings (when the venue was in Slovenia) or Croatian-Slovenian meetings (when the venue was in Croatia). This year we had 17th SLO-CRO meeting in Ptuj, Slovenia. These meetings have been recognized by the international community, and they are attended by many crystallographers also from other countries.
Prof. Goli~ was a cheerful person, but severe and fair teacher, and very diligent and precise in his work. He was very helpful to their co-workers and he was also a great deal responsible for my academic career and my study in England. I remember the beginning of the X-ray structural analysis in seventies of the past century, when we had been collecting multi-layer film data on Weissenberg and precession cameras. I remembered the film scale and an eye-estimation of intensities. It lasted six months to collect the data and we punched cards (code 026 and 029) and used the computers like CDC and later DEC-10, DEC-20 and Vax. Prof. Goli~ was a versatile crystallographer, he made himself the Patterson-Tunnell strips and it was very exciting to see the atomic structures drawn at equally spaced glass plates. He was very technically gifted and had a large
collection of very good and precise tools. There was always a small screw driver in the pocket of his gown just if something could go wrong. He was able to repair quite a lot a faults on our diffractometers, because the service visits to our country in those days were scarce and quite expensive.
His bibliography contains 201 original scientific contributions mainly dealing with the crystallographic challenges. From the early stages of Slovenian chemical crystallography I would like to mention his valuable contribution to the thematics of hydrogen bond in the article: Crystal and molecular structure of hydrogen-bonded adduct of pyridine N-oxide with trichloroacetic acid (Goli~, Hadži, Lazarini, 1971) and in the connection with ceramics: Phase relationships and crystal chemistry in systems US-CaS, US-SrS and US-BaS (Komac, Goli~, Kolar, 1971).
His last contribution was to help our pharmaceutical industry; it was a crystal structure of a drug used for treatment of hypertension (Simoni~, Zupan~i~, Golo-bi~, Goli~, Stanovnik, 2008).
Crystallographers and all scientists from related fields, as well as other colleagues and friends will keep memory of Professor Ljubo Goli~. His coworkers and students, inspired with his love for crystallography, will continue his work. All of us miss him as well as his mode of work very much.
Ivan Leban with c^-workers Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia.

***