Egon Zakrajšek

Egon Zakrajšek (July 7, 1941 – September 19, 2002) was a Slovene mathematician and computer scientist.

Life and work

Early life and education

Zakrajšek was born in Ljubljana, SFR Yugoslavia (today Slovenia). He became an orphan even before he started school. He went to elementary school and gymnasium in Jesenice. In 1965 he graduated from technical mathematics at the Department of mathematics and physics of the then Faculty for natural sciences and technology (FNT) of the University of Ljubljana with the diploma work Numerično računanje lastnih vrednosti nesimetričnih matrik. He received his Master's degree from the University of Zagreb for his work Numerična realizacija Ritzovega procesa and his doctorate in 1978 in Ljubljana with his dissertation O invariantni vložitvi pri reševanju diferencialnih enačb under the mentorship of Zvonimir Bohte.

Career

Zakrajšek was one of the pioneers of computer science in Slovenia and Yugoslavia. He became an expert on the first computers of the University of Ljubljana, the Zuse Z-23 and its successor the IBM 1130. In 1968, he took over the management of the Computing Center of the Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Mechanics (IMFM) in Ljubljana, and also took care of software and solved computer problems from other disciplines and from economics. In 1969, together with Janez Štalec and Konstantin Momirović, he designed and developed the SS Statistical System, which first ran on the new IBM 1130 computer at the IMFM and was in use for twenty years.

He later participated in the development of programming languages, tools and operating systems. At the same time he wrote textbooks and manuals for them: for Z-23 assembly, Algol (Algol 60, Algol 68), Fortran, Pascal, for domestic structran. In 1982 he set off for the United States and he became the manager of programming equipment at the Cromemco company. In 1994 he returned to Ljubljana, and became associate professor at the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the FNT. With his advocacy for the C language and open operating systems, that is, Unix and Linux, he helped to modernize his country in computer science. He additionally became an expert for TeX, LaTeX and MATLAB.

Beside his computer science skills he was also an mathematician. He taught about the usage of mathematics in natural and social sciences, statistics, mechanics, classical applied mathematics, discrete mathematics, graph and network theory, linear programming, operational researches, numerical analysis.

In 1965 he received Student Prešeren Award from University of Ljubljana. He was mentor to diploma works to 22 students, among them notibly Rado Flajs, Primož Jakopin, Marko Petkovšek, Tomaž Pisanski, and Tomislav Žitko. He was comentor for Rado Flajs' doctoral thesis in 2000.

His son Egon, born in 1967, is a renowned economist who worked for several years at the Fed.