Pamięci Alvydasaa Kondratasa
A friend from Lithuania passed away
The news reached us late about the death of a good man, a friend, a colleague not only in the field of science. Alvydas always visited us when he visited Poland, and His door was always open when any of us visited Kaunas. Some of us had the pleasure of crossing the Baltic Sea under sail with Him under the command of the invaluable Captain Kiełbasiński. We will remain with good memories from the past years. Rest in peace!
Biography
Professor Alvydas Kondratas was born on March 25, 1949 in Kaunas. In 1967, he graduated from the 6th Secondary School in Kaunas and in the same year he entered the Faculty of Light Industry of the KPI, graduating in 1972. acquiring the profession of a mechanical engineer. He conducted scientific research in the field of improving the mechanisms of textile machines at the University of Łódź as a doctoral student of this university. After defending his thesis as a candidate of technical sciences (now a doctor), he returned to work at the then Faculty of Light Industry of KPI as an assistant, then as an associate professor. in 1980. At the University of Leningrad, he improved his skills on a 10-month French language course, and then started working as a teacher at the Algerian Institute of Light Industry in Boumerdes.
After Lithuania declared independence in 1991, he contributed greatly to the establishment and development of the KTU Center for International Studies, teaching mechanical engineering courses in French there. He became a professor.
If we say about people who are particularly focused on their professional activity that their workplace is their second home, it must be admitted that for Alvydas it was his first home. Usually only the sunset took him out of there. His main concern that day was the students and the quality of the subjects taught, and his main weakness, even hobby, was the theory of mechanisms and machines. In addition to methodological work in Lithuanian and French, he did not refuse to help and contributed to the preparation of the textbook on Theory of Mechanisms and Machines, methodological instructions for course design and control tasks in English. His skills in using information technologies, which he knew well, were particularly valuable here. The professor is one of the main authors of the Dictionary of Mechanics Terms in Five Languages, for which, together with his co-authors, he was the 2020 Winner of the Award of the State Commission of the Lithuanian Language for the promotion of the Lithuanian language. Professor Alvydas Kondratas was a very kind, helpful and warm person. He reacted sensitively to professional and administrative incompetence and injustice, although he did not participate in public discourse on these issues. In his youth, he tried his hand at academic rowing, and in his more mature years he did not refuse to sail on a yacht on the Baltic Sea with his friends from academic youth from Poland. Maybe it was the only week of the year when he didn't visit his office all day.