Croatian History

Anthony Maglica, holder of hundreds of patents and trademarks, founded Mag Instrument, Inc, in Los Angeles in 1955, and designed Mag-Lite flashlight, which is now an American product icon, among 100 top products that “America makes best”. The Maglite products have been honored by the Japan Institute of Design and the Museum for Applied Art in Germany. Mag Instrument donated thousands of flashlights to aid in the rescue efforts at the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. Born in…

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Agabekov SA is world’s famous company seated in Geneva, Switzerland, dealing with exterior lighting design. Mr Youri Agabekov, the founder of the company, has Croatian roots: his father is Ladislav Žerjavić, from Hrvatsko Zagorje (village of Mače) near Zagreb. His products have been used to cover with soft lighting such buildings like (photos by kind permission of Mr. Youri Agabekov): the Vatican Louvre, Paris Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow Saint Michel Bridge, Paris Palace of Sponza in Dubrovnik, Croatia Villa Astra in…

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Ralph Tony Sarich (born in 1938) is an Australian Croat who developed the Orbital Engine in 1972. He is a recipent of several prestigeous ingeneering awards like Australian Inventor of the Year 1972, Sir Lawrence Hartnett Inventors Award 1972, Churchill Medal, British Society of Engineers 1987 and Clunies Ross National Science and Technology Award 1991. His parents are Croatian immigrants to Australia. See Orbital Engine Patent. Miss Australia Michelle Downes visited Ralph Sarich’s workshop where she was shown his revolutionary…

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Emilio Marin, associé étranger de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2003 (archéologie et histoire) The service of buying parking tickets via mobile phones is today widespread worldwide. The service has been conceived and developed in Croatia.

Daniel D. Gajski, a hero of Computer Science. Prof.Dr. Franz Ramming wrote the following: “… Daniel Gajski did not just light the fire, he also fuelled it substantially. During the last three decades he achieved pioneering results. He was a principal contributor to the areas Silicon Compilation, High-Level Synthesis, and System-Level Design. …”

Zvonko Vranesic is distinguished Croatian-Canadian expert in Computer Engineering and a member of Canadian Chess Hall of Fame.

Branko Katalinic, professor of robotics at the Technical University in Vienna, Austira, has founded a prestigeous international association DAAAM in 1990. Among the past conferences, four of them have been organized in Croatia until 2009: in Dubrovnik, twice in Opatija and in Zadar. The DAAAM comprises more than fifty member states and hundreds of international organizations.

Jakša Cvitanic is Professor of Mathematical Finance at Caltech. Prior to joining Caltech in 2005, he held positions as Professor of Mathematics and Economics at USC and Associate Professor of Statistics at Columbia University. He is regarded as a leading expert in mathematical finance. Professor Cvitanic was born in the city of Split, Croatia, and completed his studies of mathematics at the University of Zagreb.

Drazen Prelec, born in Croatia’s capital Zagreb in 1955, completed his studies of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University in 1978, and earned Ph.D in 1983 in Experimental Psychology. He is one of the leading experts of Neuroeconomics, where pscychology and neuroscience intersect. Professor Prelec investigates both the development of normative decision theory and the exploration of the empirical failures of that theory. He is employed at MIT, holding three appointments: at the Department of Economics, Department of Brain and Cognitive…

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In 1997 Tomislav Uzelac, a student of the Universty of Zagreb, Croatia, invented the  AMP Playback Engine, the first successful MP3 player. Two students from the University of Utah adapted it to work on Windows, and called it WinAMP.