Bela Ribar (1930-2006)

Professor Bela Ribar died suddenly on March 22, 2006 in Novi Sad, Serbia. He was born September 5th 1930 in Debeljača, Yugoslavia. He started his academic career at the Faculty of Sciences in Sarajevo in 1958. Being a grantee of the Swiss National Fund, he spent three years at the Crystallography Dept. of Bern U., where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1969. He joined the Faculty of Sciences in Novi Sad (1970), became a full professor in 1980. In 1987 he became a member of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Vojvodina (VANU) and a permanent member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) in 2000. In May 2004, he became a the foreign member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA).

He published over 200 papers in the field of crystallography most of them in leading international journals and he made significant scientific contributions by studying the crystal structure of a series of inorganic and organic substances and minerals. According to Science Citation Index (through end of 2001) his results were cited over 1000 times in various scientific publications of different branches of fundamental research.

During 25 years of activity in Novi Sad he did a lot for the development of structural crystallography in the region of Vojvodina. He was the founder and the head of the Laboratory for Crystal Structure Analysis within the Institute of Physics of the Faculty of Sciences until his retirement. He shared his knowledge and experience with great enthusiasm with his collaborators as they prepared their M.Sc.and Ph.D. theses under his supervision and became prominent researchers themselves. He was one of the founders and active members of the Yugoslav Center for Crystallography. He was also the first president of the Serbian Crystallographic Society founded in 1991, which, mostly due to his scientific reputation, soon joined the European Crystallographic Assn and the IUCr (1992/3). He served for many years as a referee for the international journals Acta Crystallographica and the Journal of Solid State Chemistry and he was a member of the Editorial Board for publications from the Yugoslav Center for Crystallography.