Josip Pečarić

Josip Pečarić was born on 2 September 1948 in Kotor, on the Bay of Kotor (Boka Kotorska), then in the Socialist Republic of Montenegro within Yugoslavia. Sources differ on the year: HAZU's membership record, Wikipedia and a 2019 tribute by colleagues in Mathematical Inequalities and Applications give 1948, while HAZU's death announcement gives 1947.

He was the youngest of three children in what his colleagues described as a simple, hardworking family. His father, Ermenedildo Pečarić, was a postman and later a waiter in a restaurant, and his mother, Ivica Tulić, was a housewife. He completed elementary and secondary school in Kotor. The Croatian community and heritage of the Bay of Kotor remained a lifelong theme in his writing.

Pečarić studied at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the University of Belgrade, graduating in 1972 with a thesis in nuclear physics. He took a master's degree there in 1975 with a thesis on the theory of the Earth's magnetic field on the surface of a layered model with an inclined base, supervised by the mathematician Dobrilo Tošić.

Tošić and Dragoslav Mitrinović, author of the influential Springer book Analytic Inequalities, drew him into pure mathematics. His first two papers, written with Gradimir Milovanović, appeared in 1976. Mitrinović then invited him to work on a doctorate. He completed his thesis, Jensen's and related inequalities, in 1979, but was only awarded the PhD in 1982 after what colleagues described as a series of attacks on his work. R. P. Boas Jr. sat on the committee. Petar Vasić is also listed as a supervisor.

After his studies Pečarić worked as a research engineer at the Institute for Geomagnetic Research in Grocka and taught physics at the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Belgrade. In 1986 and 1987 he lectured on linear algebra in a UNESCO-organised master's programme at the University of Novi Sad.

In 1987 he moved to Zagreb as associate professor at the Faculty of Textile Technology of the University of Zagreb and became a full professor soon after. He taught calculus, numerical analysis and convex functions, led the seminar Inequalities and Applications at the Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Science and was principal investigator of the national project of the same name. Croatian Wikipedia notes that from 2019 he also worked at RUDN University in Moscow.

His research centred on the theory of inequalities, especially Jensen-type, convexity and operator inequalities. HAZU credits him with more than 1,200 scientific papers, making him one of about ten mathematicians worldwide with over 500 papers in MathSciNet. By 2018 MathSciNet listed him with 231 co-authors. His books include Recent Advances in Geometric Inequalities (1989), Inequalities Involving Functions and Their Integrals and Derivatives (1991), Convex Functions, Partial Orderings, and Statistical Applications (1992), Classical and New Inequalities in Analysis (1993), Mond-Pečarić Method in Operator Inequalities (2005) and Multiplicative Inequalities of Carlson Type and Interpolation (2006).

In 1992 and 1993 he spent long research visits at La Trobe University and the University of Adelaide in Australia, where work with Bertram Mond produced the Mond-Pečarić method, the basis of more than a hundred papers on operator inequalities. He also made research visits to Luleå University of Technology in Sweden and the University of Turin. Between 2006 and 2014 he spent at least three months a year at the Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan, where he supervised 13 PhD theses from 2009 to 2016.

In 1998, with Neven Elezović, he founded Mathematical Inequalities and Applications, and in 2007 the Journal of Mathematical Inequalities and Operators and Matrices, all published by Element in Zagreb and later indexed in SCI-Expanded. He served as editor-in-chief of Mathematical Inequalities and Applications and launched the book series Monographs in Inequalities in 2005. By 2019 he had directly supervised 35 doctoral theses, starting with Sanja Varošanec in 1994.

Pečarić married Ankica in 1970. Colleagues wrote that she accompanied him to virtually every conference and scientific trip, and that he often joked that his family was the victim of his two passions, mathematics and politics. Ankica co-authored at least one of his historical books (Strossmayerova oporuka, 2002). They had three children, Ivana, Đilda and Anđela, and grandsons. He was a keen supporter of the Croatian national football team and a friend of the group theorist Zvonimir Janko.

From 1998 Pečarić published a large body of non-mathematical work, by HAZU's count more than 150 books, pamphlets and open letters, on modern Croatian history, politics and the Croatian heritage of the Bay of Kotor. He wrote from a far-right, strongly nationalist perspective, was a frequent speaker at public gatherings and appeared often on conservative television and internet programmes. He was an admirer of Franjo Tuđman (Trijumf tuđmanizma, Tuđmanove tri sekunde) and wrote in defence of the singer Marko Perković Thompson and of generals and politicians tried at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, which he called a racist court.

Pečarić's historical writing drew sustained criticism. His books Srpski mit o Jasenovcu (Serbian Myth about Jasenovac, 1998 and 2000) and Razotkrivena jasenovačka laž (The Jasenovac Lie Revealed, 2018, with Stjepan Razum) argued that the Ustasha camp at Jasenovac was a labour camp with far fewer victims than commonly accepted and that many of its victims were Croats killed by Yugoslav communist authorities after the war. Historians and the Simon Wiesenthal Centre described such work as historical negationism, and the Centre urged the Croatian government to ban publications denying Ustasha crimes. His 2017 book General Praljak, with Miroslav Međimorec, portrayed the convicted war criminal Slobodan Praljak as a humanist and war hero.

In August 2015 he organised a petition and open letter to President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović and HDZ leader Tomislav Karamarko asking that the salute Za dom spremni, used by the Ustasha regime in the Second World War, become the official greeting of the Croatian armed forces. When the president's office called the idea unserious and unacceptable, he replied that its statements had clearly been written by people who read Croatian history through Serbian eyes. He also defended the footballer Josip Šimunić after Šimunić led the chant at Maksimir stadium. Even some right-leaning historians, such as Mario Jareb, publicly disputed his claim that the salute was an old Croatian greeting.

Croatian State Award for Science in the field of natural sciences (1996). Order of Danica Hrvatska with the face of Ruđer Bošković, conferred by President Franjo Tuđman (1999). Associate member (1992) and full member (2000) of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, elected to full membership at 52. Member of the New York Academy of Sciences. Corresponding member of the Duklja Academy of Sciences and Arts (from 28 March 2016). A 2008 conference marked his 60th birthday, with an issue of the Banach Journal of Mathematical Analysis (volume 2, number 2) dedicated to him; a 2014 conference celebrated his 1,000th mathematical paper; and the MIA2018 conference in Zagreb marked his 70th birthday.

In mathematics Pečarić is remembered as a central figure in the modern theory of inequalities: a systematiser of a vast and scattered literature, a finder of simpler proofs and unifying generalisations, a founder of three international journals and a mentor to dozens of doctoral students in Croatia, Pakistan and elsewhere. R. P. Boas Jr. wrote that he had systemised an enormous amount of material and given many original contributions to the field.

In Croatian public life his legacy is contested. At his death, conservative and veteran circles mourned a great scientist and patriot, while outlets such as Index.hr and Jutarnji list recalled him chiefly as a historical revisionist and the most prominent advocate of the Ustasha salute.

Selected mathematical books: Recent Advances in Geometric Inequalities (1989, with D. S. Mitrinović and V. Volenec); Inequalities Involving Functions and Their Integrals and Derivatives (1991, with Mitrinović and A. M. Fink); Convex Functions, Partial Orderings, and Statistical Applications (1992, with F. Proschan and Y. L. Tong); Classical and New Inequalities in Analysis (1993, with Mitrinović and Fink); Mond-Pečarić Method in Operator Inequalities (2005, with T. Furuta, J. Mićić Hot and Y. Seo); Multiplicative Inequalities of Carlson Type and Interpolation (2006, with L. Larsson, L. Maligranda and L.-E. Persson).

Selected historical and political books: Srpski mit o Jasenovcu (1998); Borba za Boku kotorsku (1999); Serbian Myth about Jasenovac (2001); Za hrvatsku Hrvatsku (2001); Tuđmanove tri sekunde (2004, with Dubravko Jelčić); Književnik Mile Budak sada i ovdje (2005, with Jelčić); Zločinački sud u Haagu (2008); Hajka na Thompsona (2012); General Praljak (2017, with Miroslav Međimorec); Razotkrivena jasenovačka laž (2018, with Stjepan Razum).

He was interviewed on programmes including LaudatoTV's Moja Hrvatska, Bujica, Narod.hr and regional television in Vinkovci.

Josip Pečarić died in Zagreb on Thursday 29 October 2026, in the 79th year of his life, according to an announcement by the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Many outlets reported his age as 79. The cause of death was not made public, and funeral details had not been announced at the time of writing. Tributes appeared from conservative media, veterans' portals and colleagues, while other outlets recalled the controversies of his political writing.