Obituary Dr. Robert Jahn

Dr Robert Jahn passed away on 8 March, 2023. He had been Secretary General of IS4SI from the beginning until he stepped down in 2017. Jahn had made this function, which he performed free of charge, his passion for the benefit of the organisational development of our association. He played a major role in maintaining  the website, took part in the 2013 summit in Moscow, did all he could to support the professional organisation of the next summit in 2015 at the TU Wien (Technical University Vienna) and was helpful in shaping the financial arrangements as well as the rules of procedure for Special Interest Groups and Chapters. Until his death, he remained connected to us by taking over the function of an auditor.

Robert Jahn, born on 28 April, 1962, joined in the nineties the TU Wien project group „On the genesis of information structures“ under the lead of Peter Fleissner. In 1997, he completed his studium irregulare with a dissertation on „Aspects of the concept of information in ethology“. He lived in Vienna and worked there for a long time as IT Manager for the international corporation RHI Magnesita.

We will not forget him.

2023 03 08

Obituary Dr. Loet Leyesdorff

Our colleague *Louis André (Loet) Leydesdorff* (born 21 August1948, Batavia, Dutch East Indies) passed away on 11 March 2023, inAmsterdam. He was well known to FIS and IS4SI members. His contributions inFIS discussion list were numbered in the hundreds, spanning for morethan 20 years. He also participated in IS4SI conferences, in Vienna 2013and Gotteborg 2015. He was a friendly colleague, witty, humorous, and aformidable polemicist. In his academic research, he was a brilliantcontributor in a variety of information fields, mostly related tosocial communication and innovation matters. Scholarly, he was a renowned sociologist, cyberneticist,communication scientist and Professor in the Dynamics of Scientific Communicationand Technological Innovation at the University of Amsterdam. He wasrecently recognized as the third most cited Dutch researcher in all fields,and also was in a very high position at the international level. He is mostly known for his work in the sociology of communication and innovation, especially for his Triple helix model of innovation developed with Henry Etzkowitz in the 1990s. Leydesdorff’s researchinterests were in the fields of the philosophy of science, social network analysis, scientometrics, and the sociology of innovation.His studies in communication in science, technology, and innovationenabled him to specify theory and methods for understanding the dynamics ofknowledge-based development. He received a B.Sc. in chemistry in1969, a M.Sc. biochemistry in 1973, and an M.A. in philosophy in 1977. In1984 he obtained his Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Amsterdam.In 1980 he became Senior lecturer at the Department of Science &Technology Dynamics of the University of Amsterdam and from 2000 of theAmsterdam School of Communications Research as well, of which he remained a honorary fellow following his retirement as professor in 2013.Despite being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2014 he continued to bean active scholar until he had to resign from his remaining duties inthe fall of 2022. He passed away in Amsterdam on 11 March 2023. He received the Derek de Solla Price Memorial Medal forscientometrics in 2003. Since 2006 he was Honorary Research Fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts andSciences. And since 2007 Honorary Fellow of SPRU – Science and TechnologyPolicy Research of the University of Sussex. Currently he was president ofthe Dutch Systems Group society, the society that cofounded with the International Federation for Systems Research in the begin of the1980s. Requiescat in Pacem, His colleagues at FIS and IS4SI will badly miss him.

2023 03 11