During ICC 2021 in Florence, Vladimir Tikunov received the ICA Honorary Fellowship. Below you can read Liqiu Meng‘s laudation:
Born in 1949, Prof. Vladimir Tikunov still works, since 2013 as honorary professor, of Geography and head of the Laboratory of Integrated Mapping of the Geographical Faculty of Lomonosov Moscow State University. He is a member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and of the International Eurasian Academy of Sciences, and sits on the editorial boards of 16 scientific journals.
His main scientific contributions are related to the development of the theory of geoinformatics; the creation of a new scientific direction –mathematic-cartographic modeling; modeling and visualization of geosystems, including in the non-Euclidean metric; development of a system of indices and indicators for integrated geographic characteristics of the development of territories. He authored over 800 papers and edited a large number of atlases, amongst which also the National atlas of Russia.
Professor Tikunov made an important contribution to the development of cartography education in Russia and neighbouring countries. He developed training courses in geoinformatics and mathematical-cartographic modeling, which are currently taught at many universities in Russia and the countries of CIS and from 1980 onwards wrote many textbooks like Mathematical modeling in Geography, Modeling in the socio-economic cartography(where the methods for modeling the thematic content of socio-economic maps were proposed for the first time), followed by Modelling in Cartography, Visualization in noneuclidean metrics and Anamorphoses. He is especially known world-wide for his work on anamorphic maps. He was and is the organiser of the well-appreciated InterCarto-InterGIS Conference Series (with its 27th edition in 2021). Initially these conferences brought Russian colleagues in contact with colleagues in Western Europe and in East, but this has been extended to researchers and practitioners from all over the world.In these conferences he is always trying to establish connections with ICA and to integrate ICA as a partner.To familiarize Russian scientists with modern foreign achievements, he translated many articles and books into Russian.
Professor Tikunov’s first contacts with the ICA were in 1976 when he assisted the local organisation of the 8th ICC in Moscow. He became a commission member in 1996, chaired the ICA Commission on Education 1999-2003 and then was elected ICA Vice-president, in which capacity he played an important role as liaison between the EC and the Russian organizing committee for the 23rd ICC in Moscow. From 2007-2019 he chaired the ICA Commission on GI for Sustainable Development
In 2015 Vladimir Tikunov was awarded the diploma for outstanding services to ICA, but in our opinion that award did not sufficiently match his many and ongoing contributions to the cartographic community, and that is why we would like to award Vladimir Tikunov the honorary fellowship“in recognition of his border-crossing contribution to cartography throughout his career”.
