In memoriam: Mirjanka Lechthaler

Abstract

Mirjanka Lechthaler, who friends referred to as Mika, passed away due to seriuos illness. She fought it bravely and we were surprised to hear about her death. Mirjanka (born Zdenković) was born in Zagreb on September 9, 1947. After finishing high school, she studied at the Faculty of Geodesy of the University of Zagreb, and graduated in 1972. She finished postgraduate studies of informatics at the University of Zagreb with the thesis “Cartographic communication and information content of 1 cm2 of the topographic map 1:1 000 000" in 1976. Mirjanka Lechthaler finished her PhD studies at the Faculty of Geodesy with the dissertation “Entropy of relief representation using contour lines on a series of topographic maps“ in 1985. She passed the state geodesy exam in 1984.

She started working at the Institute for Cartography of the Faculty of Geodesy of the University of Zagreb in 1972 and became a scientific assistant in 1976. In 1985, she moved to Vienna, where her Croatian doctoral dissertation was nostrificated at the University of Technology. From 1990, she worked as an assistant and deputy head of the Institut für Kartographie und Geo-Medientechnik at the Vienna University of Technology. From 1999, she worked as an assistant professor in the Research Group of Cartography at the Vienna University of Technology. She lectured basic and advanced courses in analogous, digital and web cartography. She was retired in 2011 and died in Vienna on November 16, 2016.