Obituary—Dr. Karl Javorszky

A message from Pedro C. Marijuán:

Dr. Karl Javorszky passed away on 24 October. He was a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Philosophies since its beginning. He was well known for his original contributions on a new number theory and the way living beings “account” their functioning. He was also a very dear acquaintance of mine. He received his Doctor of Philosophy (Psychology) from Wien University, Austria and worked as a consulting psychologist, diagnostician (contracted with Austrian Social Security) and statistician for many years. His other professional activities were also related to statistics (social marketing, data modeling, data processing design and development, information security) in several Austrian companies and institutions. In other words, he developed an intense work experience outside Academia focused on statistics and the different measurements of qualitative statistics.

He came to visit me in Zaragoza as early as 1994. He had sent me a long letter with an interesting manuscript on “multidimensional partitions’” as a potential tool for the study of information transmission in living cells and mammalian brains. At that time, it was a hot topic in my own research field, and I invited him to deliver a Seminar at the University of Zaragoza, Spain on his new approach to biology via his original number theory. He soon produced a dense manuscript on the topics of his visit (“Zaragoza Lectures”). Afterwards we cooperated for several years within a small group (with computer scientist Jose Pastor and biologist Morris Villarroel) on the development of his multidimensional partitions work—a fascinating topic which we unfortunately could not continue as a group and has mostly remained out from my own focus.

The idea that “distinctions” in a set of N elements are limited, either regarding one single property or a plurality of them, and that they can be rigorously expressed via either unidimensional partitions or multidimensional partitions, is a mind-boggling issue full of formal consequences and potential applications. We worked out a few of them—Morris and José did terrific work that was partially published. Karl went on to develop the contrast between the accounting based on the sequential versus the simultaneous, and the melody versus the accord—which he referred to as the Sumerian versus the Akkadian ways of counting, N! versus N?. This can be found in quite a few of the messages he posted in the FIS discussion list (Foundations of Information Science, at https://fis.sciforum.net/fis-discussion-sessions/) where he preferentially presented his further elaborations on the relationship between the accounting systems N! and N? as a genuine foundation of Nature accounting processes. For almost 30 years, veteran FISers enjoyed his curious writing style, with plenty of metaphors and colorful references, always eloquently presented in a friendly and perhaps rather insistent way. However, Dr. Javorszky was always a charming man; discrete, polite and somehow elusive and shy—except concerning his beloved Sumerian / Akkadian counting systems and the way nature computes her cyclicity. He will forgive me that from time to time I ventured to discuss with him that enigmatic N?.

Apart from the many messages published in the FIS list archives, there is a collection of Karl’s more formal papers at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Karl-Javorszky and also on Google Scholar at https://scholar.google.es/scholar?hl=es&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=karl+javorszky&btnG=.

ORCID is also a valuable source to follow his professional activities and publications: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4751-2682.

Pedro C. Marijuán and Philosophies Editorial Office