Academician Bogdan Gavrilović and His Digitized Works


Žarko Mijajlović




Bogdan Gavrilović was born in Novi Sad on January 1,1864. Top of the class in his generation, after completing secondary education he was sent by Tekelianum (a Serbian educational institution) to study at the Philosophical Faculty of the University in Budapest, where he obtained doctor's degree in mathematics in 1887. In the same year he was appointed professor at the High School in Belgrade which in 1905 was promoted to the University of Belgrade. He lived in Belgrade until his death in 1947, active as university professor until 1941. He was elected member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences in 1901 and of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences in 1906. He has great merits for the foundation of Belgrade University and he was elected twice for the rector of the University. On the end of XIX century he had published two voluminous university textbooks which had the character of monographs: Analytical Geometry (1896) on 900 pages, and Theory of Determinants (1899) on linear algebra. Both works may be considered as capital works in mathematics in Serbia. Academician Radivoj Kašanin thus wrote of the two books: „Both, especially the latter, would do honour to any nation, and many countries, at that time more powerful and luckier than us, could not boast of such works." The aim of this paper is to present the work and life of Bogdan Gavrilović and his digitized books and papers deposited in the Virtual Library of the Faculty of Mathematics in Belgrade.