In 1954, after completing his studies in librarianship at Columbia University, Dr. Garfield founded his own firm, Eugene Garfield Associates, where he was able to put into practice his ideas about the modern uses of computers for library and information purposes. Ten years later, the first volume of the Science Citation Index was published. Dr. Garfield first announced this title in 1960, when he transformed his earlier company into the Institute for Scientific Information in Philadelphia. Dr. Garfield has now been the president of this Institute continuously for thirty-two years...
Through his personal visits to Czechoslovakia (the first in the 1960s, the last in 1990), Dr. Garfield has contributed significantly to the introduction of exact methods in the field of scientific information, and at the same time, through his information systems, he has introduced Czech academic publications into the world literature. He has become for us an example how an individual may be capable of expertly and objectively evaluating a scientific publication and informing the widest possible public of its existence.
Dr. Eugene Garfield (left) with Prof. MUDr. Zdenek Lojda, DrSc., of the First Faculty of Medicine
Prof. Petr Sgall is a world authority in the field of theoretical and computer linguistics, the founder of mathematical (computer) linguistics in the Czech Republic, and the inventor of an original technique for the formal description of language, which is applied primarily to Czech, but can also be used for English and other languages. Already in 1959, together with several young colleagues from the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University, he founded a Group for Algebraic Linguistics and the Theory of Computerised Translation at the Czech Language Department of the Philosophical Faculty, and shortly afterwards he set up a similar group at the Centre for Numerical Mathematics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. These two groups were combined early in 1968 into the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics at the Philosophical Faculty. However, as a result of the attitudes of Prof. Sgall and his colleagues to the events of August 1968 and all that followed, Prof. Sgall was removed from his post as the head of the Laboratory of Algebraic Linguistics, the laboratory was disbanded, and in 1972 he was supposed to leave the university. Thanks to the solidarity of some of his colleagues at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, however, the staff of the Laboratory were instead transferred to the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Here, through the indomitable enthusiasm, scientific fervour and organisational skills of Prof. Sgall, it was possible not merely to preserve the subject, but even to successfully develop it, to maintain contacts with foreign colleagues, and eventually to nurture a whole group of young researchers and teachers, who today work at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, the Institute of Theoretical and Computational Linguistics at the Philosophical Faculty, and at other academic centres both here and abroad.
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