Academician Vladimir Rakočević passed away

It is with deep regret that the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SASA) announces the passing of Academician Vladimir Rakočević at the age of 74, on 8 March 2026, in Belgrade. Born on 30 January 1953 in Niš, he was one of our foremost mathematicians.

He graduated in 1975 from the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš, from the Department of Mathematics. He completed his master’s degree at the Faculty of Mathematics, University of Skopje. He defended his master’s thesis, ‘Fredholm Operators,’ in 1979, and his doctoral dissertation, ‘Essential Spectrum and Banach Algebras,’ in 1984 at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Belgrade.

Following his graduation, he started working as a teaching assistant at the Faculty of Philosophy (now the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics) in Niš. He was promoted to the position of assistant professor in 1985, associate professor in 1989, and full professor in 1994. He taught undergraduate, master’s and doctoral courses in Functional Analysis, Measure and Integration Theory, Operator Theory, Summability Theory, Fixed Point Theory, Generalised Inverses, Measures of Non-compactness, Banach Algebras, etc. He was a member of the Faculty Council, a member of the Board for Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Niš, head of the mathematics teaching and research group, president of the Niš branch of the Mathematical Society of Serbia, etc. Master’s and doctoral studies at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in Niš in the field of functional analysis and operator theory, organised by Academician Rakočević, are today recognised as a school with an international reputation. His contribution to the development of distinguished teaching and research staff at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics of the University of Niš was outstanding.

He also served on numerous master’s and doctoral thesis defence committees at the universities of Belgrade, Novi Sad, Priština and Skopje. He served as an examiner for postgraduate studies at the Faculty of Science in Belgrade; for habilitation at Université Le Havre (France); and for doctoral studies at the universities of Melbourne (Australia) and New Delhi (India).

As a lecturer, he participated in many conferences in Serbia and abroad (Poland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, Germany, Jordan, Mexico, etc.).

He was elected as a corresponding member of SASA in 2015 and became a full member in 2021. Since the establishment of the SASA Branch in Niš in 2016, he actively participated in its activities – he served as the Branch secretary in the period between 2016 and 2020, was a member of the Management Committee of the SASA Branch in Niš and the Branch’s Vice-President. Within the Academy, he led the project ‘Fixed Points for Mappings in Various Spaces’, as well as the project ‘Matrix Transformations, Fixed Point Theory and Applications’ at the SASA Branch in Niš.

He served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Filomat, one of the first Serbian mathematics journals indexed in the Science Citation Index (SCI). He was also a member of the editorial boards of the following journals: Fixed Point Theory (Cluj-Napoca, Romania); Facta Universitatis, Series: Mathematics and Informatics (Niš); Mathematica Moravica; Functional Analysis, Approximation and Computation; Bulletin of the Research Center for Fixed Point Theory and Applications (Tehran, Iran) and Jordan Journal of Mathematics and Statistics.

He worked in the areas of functional analysis, operator theory, generalised inverse theory, linear algebra, summability theory and fixed-point theory. His contributions to the fields he studied and in which he published papers, had a significant impact on subsequent research in Serbia and internationally. He introduced and used several innovative proof techniques and developed new concepts that are now widely used in the mathematical community (a Weil-type theorem, essential approximative spectrum, generalised spectrum, Perot-type contractions, the R-condition).

Academician Rakočević published several books and monographs and more than 230 scientific papers in prestigious international journals. According to the Web of Science database, his papers have received more than 2,500 citations. Based on his publications and citations, he was included in the prestigious list of highly cited researchers in mathematics for 2014 compiled by Thomson Reuters.

Through his scientific and educational work, he greatly contributed to the development of science and education in Serbia, as well as to the affirmation of Serbia’s science. His passing represents a profound loss to the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts and the overall society and scholarly community.