Our beloved professor, mathematician Jiří Cihlář, has passed away. It was an honor to work with him.
At the age of 81, the outstanding teacher and unforgettable person Jiří Cihlář passed away in the early morning hours of Saturday, October 26, 2024. He is and will always be strongly connected to the University of Ústí nad Labem, especially to the Faculty of Education and Science, to his beloved field and to the people who loved and respected him. He was a cheerful, kind and wise advisor and colleague to them.
Prof. RNDr. Jiří Cihlář, CSc., started teaching at the Gymnázium Na Skřivánku in Ústí nad Labem in 1966. During his three-year tenure at this school, he also taught mathematical analysis externally at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem and collaborated with the computing center of the Setuza company on the launch of computerized payroll processing and the creation of autocode for Robotron 100. In 1969, he was hired as an intern at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Education in Ústí nad Labem.
He significantly participated in the establishment and further development of the Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. After 1991, he designed the teaching of mathematics at two new faculties – the Faculty of Environment and the Faculty of Socio-Economics – and initially taught mathematics at both. In the following years, he worked as the university’s vice-rector for science, or vice-rector for development and informatics, for two terms he was also the chairman of the academic senate, was a member of the university’s scientific council and the scientific councils of some of its faculties, a member of the UJEP Ethics Commission, and was repeatedly the head of the Department of Mathematics at the UJEP Faculty of Education.
He participated in the accreditation of teaching study programs and the study program Mathematics in Companies and Public Administration. He was the supervisor of more than a hundred bachelor’s and diploma theses, he was also a supervisor in the scientific training of staff and later in doctoral studies. Over the years, he published ten scripts for the subjects he lectured, and his colleagues at the Faculty of Law, Charles University, also lectured according to his scripts.
He also participated in competitions within the Student Scientific and Professional Activities, under his leadership, students participated in national rounds and were twice winners in the mathematics section. For many years, he taught mathematics didactics in supplementary pedagogical studies within the framework of lifelong learning, thus contributing to the improvement of the qualification structure of the teaching community of the Ústí nad Labem Region. He also organized the course Statistical Data Analysis for university staff and doctoral students, and dozens of university staff used his willingness to consult in the area of processing scientific research. His lectures as part of the six-semester course Mathematics as a Part of Human Cognition and Culture, which he repeatedly delivered within the University of the Third Age, were very well received. He also lectured for Café Nobel and Teen Age University.
His scientific focus was directed towards two main areas – didactics of mathematics and probability theory and mathematical statistics. In the didactic area, he dealt mainly with the theory of obstacles and cognitive conflict, the development of the concept of infinity, applications of mathematics in teaching and the use of ICT in teaching, the creation of curricular standards and testing of students’ knowledge, textbook creation, work with gifted students and the popularization of mathematics. In the area of probability theory and mathematical statistics, he mainly focused on biometrics, modeling of processes in the human body, research planning and statistical data analysis.
Jiří Cihlář was the principal investigator and co-principal investigator of a number of projects financed by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, in cooperation with CERMAT he solved projects focused on specifying the expected outcomes in the Framework Educational Program for Basic Education and on testing students in entrance exams and school-leaving exams.
Prof. Cihlář’s work in mathematics didactics has a national and international dimension, abroad he collaborated mainly with colleagues at the University of Oslo, the Pedagogical University in Krakow and Slovak universities. He lectured at a number of conferences with a didactic focus in the country and abroad, gave lectures in doctoral studies at the Institute of Mathematical Statistics of the AP in Krakow, was a member of the state examination committees at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics of Charles University in Prague and at the Faculty of Education of the Technical University in Liberec, and was a member of the subject council of the doctoral study program in the field of Didactics of Mathematics at the Faculty of Science of the University of Prague in Olomouc.
He opposed a number of habilitation and doctoral dissertations, was a member of many habilitation and professor appointment committees. He was an assessor of grant applications for the Czech Academy of Sciences and a reviewer of many monographs and other publications (Prof. Vopěnka, Prof. Kuřina and others).
His authorship of textbooks for primary schools was also significant – together with Prof. Melichar and Dr. Zelenka, he created a unique set of workbooks for the 1st to 9th grades of primary school and, together with Dr. Zelenka, a compendium of four mathematics textbooks for the second grade of primary school, which are still used in many primary schools and multi-year grammar schools. Over the years, he has given hundreds of lectures for the teaching public in many places in the country, where he introduces teachers to new didactic knowledge.
Prof. Cihlář’s work in the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists was also meritorious, where he focused mainly on working with talented students and lectures, seminars and workshops for primary and secondary school teachers. In 1972, he founded the tradition of Summer Schools of Mathematics for high school students of the then Ústí nad Labem Region. Since that year, selected people interested in mathematics and physics have met every year during the holidays in various places in the region and developed their mathematical abilities and skills. Later, the summer schools were expanded to include elementary school students and mathematics and physics teachers of all school levels. To date, the summer schools have had more than a thousand graduates.
In the past, he was an active member of the Ústí nad Labem branch committee and the Regional Committee of the Mathematical Olympiad. He received several pedagogical awards for his care of mathematical talents, and the Congress of the Union awarded him honorary membership in 2006. For 2023, the committee of the Czech Mathematical Society awarded him the Subject Mathematics Medal of the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists.
As part of the didactic education of prof. Cihlář has closely and long-term collaborated with a number of primary and secondary schools on their specific projects (for example, with the gymnasium in Teplice or the Pod Vodojemem primary school in Ústí nad Labem) and talent care. He has led a number of successful projects entered into the SOČ competition, and his students include winners of national rounds. He was also involved as an expert in the IKAP project of the Ústí Region (Implementation of the Regional Action Plan), which focuses on mathematical literacy.
Prof. Cihlář’s cooperation with practice was also extensive; he was a member of the regional school committee and the school commission at the Ústí nad Labem City Hall. He prepared a multi-day course on the topic of Statistical Data Analysis for Companies and Institutions, which focused both on mastering the theory of statistical methods and on acquiring practical skills in working with modern statistical programs on a PC (he implemented it for the ADLER Czech, a.s. company). He was also a regular consultant to doctors at the Masaryk Hospital in Ústí nad Labem in the field of mathematical statistics, and many of the research projects conducted by the clinics there relied on statistical processing using UJEP software, and most of them resulted in joint publications in renowned journals with an impact factor.
Prof. Jiří Cihlář received the Governor’s Award for Science and Research in 2018 for his lifetime contribution.