With deep sorrow we announce that prof. RNDr. Ivan Kolář, DrSc., passed away on December 15, 2020.

Ivan Kolář was born on May 22, 1936 in Brno and most of his academic career was linked to Brno, too. Already during his study at Masaryk University, he joined the research group following the geometric footsteps of Eduard Čech. Influenced by the abstract and coordinate free approach to infinitesimals which had been recently introduced by Charles Ehresmann, Ivan Kolář worked out an abstract general version of the Cartan moving frame method and employed the newly emerged theory of jets and iterated differentials in numerous areas of differential geometry, variational calculus, and mathematical physics. Soon, these interests naturally moved his focus towards the abstract theory of natural objects and operations in differential geometry.

After a decade spent at the Brno military academy, in 1969 Ivan Kolář accepted Borůvka’s invitation to join the Brno branch of the Mathematical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. He later led this institution with grace through the difficult period of normalization until 1989. During this time, he also pushed forward the research culminating in the celebrated Springer monograph Natural Operations in Differential Geometry (published 1993, co-authored by Peter Michor and Jan Slovák, the most highly cited item ever in the 58A MathSci category, and perhaps also the initial impulse towards the 58A32 subcategory Natural Bundles in MSC2000).

In 1980, Ivan Kolář organized the very first meeting of the (still running) series of international conferences Differential Geometry and its Applications, and from 1985 he cochaired the (also still running) Central European Seminar with Peter Michor, perhaps the only regular seminar happening across the “iron curtain” before 1990. From 1991 onwards, Ivan Kolář was working at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University, where he contributed in an essential way to several further research directions, including the covariant approach to the so-called Weil bundles, the abstract axiomatic geometric approach to infinitesimals.

Ivan Kolář was the main driving force in the differential geometry group in Brno for at least forty years, and there is a large group of grateful students and collaborators pushing his views and hopes further.

Announcement in PDF