| Dan Tufiş
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This article was published in SIC: Vol. 18, No. 4/2009, pages 393-404
Creators, be they discoverers or innovators, greater or lesser, are those who, by the power of thought, widen or deepen the knowledge, open new ways for investigation, produce or improve technologies; in short, they generate knowledge. Development of knowledge is not discontinuous, it builds on the common scientific creation and, even when the memorable findings seem to be cognitive breakthroughs, one can find their elements of continuity, their sources of inspiration and analogies in the works of other contemporary or preceding creators. Most often, the important creators manage to generate schools of thinking, in that more and more new researchers follow the ways they have opened. Usually, history records only the pioneers, being somehow unfair with the other creators.
Catalysts are decision makers at a social group level and who, by their initiatives, insure the premises of the creators' activities, most often with no clear expectations or even with no clear goal of the creation activity. Catalysts are visionaries in the most proper sense of the word and, furthermore, they are people of an exemplary morality, altruist beyond the usual limit. When a scientific creation activity is supported by economic or military reasons and the expected results and benefits are predictable, it is more difficult to call the involved decision makers "catalysts", in the sense considered here. Undoubtedly, they are valuable decision agents, intelligent managers of the immediate needs of the society they represent, and their contribution to the science development is important. Still, history rarely mentions them in its gallery of "contributors".
Without being a rule, in many cases, catalysts are or have been, in their turn, creators and school shapers in the same domain. Many creators have remained anonymous acknowledged and their creations were lost only because they did not meet the proper catalysts at the proper moment.
Academician Mihai Drăgănescu, outstanding personality of the contemporary science and culture, is an exceptional creator and an authentic catalyst. His work and activity, seen from the two perspectives mentioned above, are extremely vast, partially reflected in his more than 30 monographs, more than 300 scientific papers published in national and international journals, in hundreds of appearances in the press, on radio and at television. The ways opened by academician Drăgănescu's scientific creation are followed by numerous researchers, many of them being acknowledged as leading personalities in Romania and abroad. Research projects of national importance have been coordinated, initiated or supported by Professor Mihai Drăgănescu and they all left their mark on the scientific and technical development of Romania. Numerous educational, research and development institutions and organizations, together with professional forums, created by his initiative or being under his direction, prove a way of thinking beyond the present.
Below, I will focus on his conceptual creation in the information science. Before proceeding with this difficult task, I must ascertain (by following the notional parallelism creator - catalyst) that his more than 35-year long managerial activity in informatics has many conceptual aspects. Starting with his participation to the creation of the national program (1967) for introduction of informatics in Romania at a large scale and later to the defining of the concept of National Informatics System (1970) and of the frame project for implementing this concept (1976-1980, see [10]), continuing with his restless plea for the fundamental research in informatics and his permanent guidance and encouragement offered to the talented young researchers in the new domains (as artificial intelligence, robotics or functional electronics were in the '70s) and ending with his constant concern for raising the awareness of the civil society about the informatics imperatives (for which the many papers and radio and television interviews are evidence), all of these are the measure of the "informatics catalyst" that academician Drăgănescu has been.
Concluding Remarks
My attempt to present a fragment of Professor Drăgănescu's creation and scientific activity is inevitably incomplete, and the selection of the conceptual contributions I mentioned is certainly subjective. I do not doubt that another expositor, with another specialization, will find in Drăgănescu's work in information science new conceptual aspects, many themes for scientific and philosophical reflection. Just like a really important book reveals new meanings at each reading, Professor Drăgănescu's extensive work reveals novel, surprising aspects at each analysis.
At the beginning of my professional activity, I had the chance to have Mihai Drăgănescu, a scholar fearless of the time vicissitude, as director of the National Institute for R&D in Informatics, ICI-Bucharest. I have come to know him as both a creator and a catalytic agent of advanced research. The researches that had already started in the domain of AI (in the group coordinated by Ioan Georgescu) and of robotics (in the group coordinated by dr. Adrian Davidoviciu) were strongly encouraged and led by Professor Drăgănescu. Alongside with other colleagues from the same generation (I would mention here Gh. Tecuci, M. Bărbuceanu, Ş. Voinea) and with those who came to ICI in the next years (Şt. Trăuşan-Matu, Adina Florea), young at that time, scientists of repute today, we all benefited from the competitive and intellectual emulation atmosphere created by Professor Drăgănescu. The group of young aspirant researchers mentioned above and some already experienced researchers (Dan Mânduţianu, Sanda Ionescu-Mânduţianu, Radu Bercaru) have gained experience in the laboratory that was wisely and elegantly led by dr. Margareta Drăghici, under Professor Drăgănescu's permanent "protective wing". The lack of trust and even the hostility that characterized the way in which the AI research was seen at that time could have dissolved or even destroyed the prospective young researchers's enthusiasm, if it has not been for the open sustaining of this "technology of the future" [14] by Professor Mihai Drăgănescu. I think I am not mistaken when I say that many of the professional trajectories of the young graduates hired at ICI at the end of the '70s and beginning of the '80s, who went towards research in AI, would have been different if not for the clairvoyance and direct involvement in this domain of the general director of that time, Mihai Drăgănescu.
It has been said many times that the work of a great creator must be separated and analyzed independently from the man behind it. There are famous examples of authentic creators (writers, artists, scientists) who were condemned because of their beliefs, behaviours or actions (having no connections with their work) against the authorities, the moral norms or even the course of history. If history is the one that judges in such cases, when the authentic creation belongs to a man of exemplary morality, to that MAN should our unconditioned admiration go. We can be sure that history will make us justice. Such a MAN is Academician Mihai Drăgănescu, our contemporary into the future.
Science, as well as other domains of the human culture and civilization, benefits in its becoming from two important categories of personalities, which I would generically call "creators" and "catalysts", respectively.
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