Talk:Josip Pečarić/draft2020

Josip Pečarić (born September 1948) is a Croatian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics in the Faculty of Textile Technology at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and is a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has written and co-authored over 1,200 mathematical publications.

Education
Pečarić was born in Kotor, Montenegro in September 1948, where he remained to attend elementary and high school. He studied at the University of Belgrade's Faculty of Electrical Engineering for his undergraduate and master's degrees, which he completed respectively in 1972 and 1975. The supervisor of his master's degree, mathematics professor, Dobrilo Tošić, inspired him to switch fields to mathematics.

Pečarić remained at the University of Belgrade for his PhD in mathematics, which he received in 1982 under the supervision of Petar Vasić. His dissertation was on Jensen's and related inequalities. He began working at the University of Zagreb in 1987.

Mathematics career
Pečarić is known for his work in the theory of inequalities. He has founded several journals, all published by Element in Zagreb: he is currently Editor-in-Chief at Mathematical Inequalities and Applications and at the Journal of Mathematical Inequalities, and also founded Operators and Matrices.

Pečarić has written and co-authored over 1,200 articles on mathematics in journals, books, and conference proceedings. He has also coauthored over 20 mathematical books, including 6 that are written in English.

Political views and historical negationism
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In 2001, Pečarić published Serbian Myth about Jasenovac, the second part of an earlier work entitled "Srpski mit o Jasenovcu" that was written in response to Milan Bulajić's rebuttal of Pečarić's first work (which was itself a response to Bulajić's "Jasenovacki mit" written in 1994). Among other things, the book asserts that the Jasenovac extermination camp was not an extermination camp but a "labor camp" and that the bulk of its victims were Serbian Chetnik prisoners and postwar Croatian prisoners held by Josip Broz Tito.

According to Christian Axboe Nielsen, associate professor of Southeast European Studies at Aarhus University, Pečarić regards any criticism of Croatian nationalism as "unwarranted" and like historian Josip Jurčević, dismisses the systematic and mass atrocities at Jasenovac as a "Serbian myth". Pečarić also advocates for the adoption of the World War Two-era fascist salute Za dom spremni as the Croatian army's official greeting. Nielsen describes the attitudes of Pečarić and others as "paranoid and delusional fantasies of exclusivist competitive victimhood and continued persecution" and argues that their denial of crimes perpetrated against non-Croats does a disservice to Croatia by signalling that Croats can never be held responsible for anything.

In 2017, Pecaric co-authored three books with Miroslav Medjimorec about Slobodan Praljak, the convicted war criminal. In these books Praljak is hailed as a war hero and humanist and a victim of an immoral, unjust and false indictments of The Hague tribunal. Together with bishop Vlado Košić, he wrote a letter to U.N. Security council, the Croatian Parliament and to the Croatian president proposing that Praljak be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2019, Pečarić co-authored a book with Stjepan Razum entitled The Jasenovac Lie Revealed which denied that mass murders of Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croatian anti-fascists were carried out at Jasenovac. The book, which was the latest example of far-right revisionist releases downplaying or denying crimes committed by the Ustasha regime at the camp, prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to urge Croatian authorities to ban such publications.

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In addition to his mathematical work, Pečarić has published more than 20 books and 40 articles on history and politics. This work is from a far-right point of view, and has been criticized as comprising historical negationism or Holocaust denial.

For example, Pečarić has advocated for the return of the World War II-era fascist salute Za dom spremni. This salute has been called the Croatian equivalent of the German Sieg Heil. His 2017 book General Praljak reinvents the war criminal Slobodan Praljak as a humanist and war hero. His books Serbian Myths about Jasenovac and The Jasenovac Lie Revealed, the latter coauthored with Stjepan Razum, argued that the Jasenovac concentration camp was a labor camp with much lower casualties than the commonly accepted figure, and that the bulk of its victims were Croats killed by Yugoslav communist authorities after the war. This last prompted the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to advocate the Croatian government to ban publications denying the war crimes of the Ustaša.

Honors and awards
Pečarić has received a number of honors and awards. He was awarded the Croatian National Science Award in 1996, and received the Order of Danica Hrvatska in 1999. Pečarić was appointed to full membership of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 2000. In 2008, a conference was held in honor of his 60th birthday and an issue (volume 2 no. 2) of the Banach Journal of Mathematical Analysis was dedicated to him. Another conference was held in 2014 in Pečarić's honor on the occasion of the publication of his 1000th mathematical paper.

Selected books on history and politics

 * Srpski mit o Jasenovcu: Skrivanje istine o beogradskim konc-logorima. Croatian information centre, Zagreb 1998.
 * Srpski mit o Jasenovcu II: O Bulajićevoj ideologijigenocida hrvatskih autora. Element, Zagreb 2000.
 *  Serbian myth about Jasenovac. Stih, Zagreb 2001. ISBN 978-9-53695-900-6