Obituary: Associate Professor Emeritus Ain Isotamm passed away

A good colleague of ours, Associate Professor Emeritus Ain Isotamm (02.06.1942-03.10.2024), has passed away.

Ain Isotamm graduated from Tartu III Secondary School in 1960 and from the Faculty of Economics of the University of Tartu in 1965, majoring in finance and credit. He obtained a Bachelor of Economics degree from Vilnius University in 1972. 

In 1967 Ain worked as an assistant in the Department of Finance and Credit at the University of Tartu. From 1967 to 1970, he was a graduate student at the Tallinn University of Technology, the then Tallinn Polytechnic Institute, at the Department of Statistics and Accounting under the supervision of Professor Uno Mereste. From 1970 to 1971 he worked as a trainee at the Calculation Centre of the Tallinn Polytechnic Institute, where he realised the importance of computers and programming in processing scientific data. A colleague taught Ain how to programme, and after that, he wrote all his own programmes. 

In 1971, Ain returned to Tartu to work as a senior researcher at the University of Tartu Computing Centre. From 1972, he worked at the University of Tartu in the Department of Economic Cybernetics and Statistics and the Computing Centre and later in the Applied Mathematics Problem Laboratory. From 1981 to 1986, he was a senior lecturer, Associate Professor, head of the department and from 1992 to 1997, head of the Department of Economic Informatics. From 1994 to 1996, he continued his education in Boston, USA. In the autumn of 1998, Ain joined the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu, where he was a senior researcher, then he became an Associate Professor, and later an Associate Lecturer from 2007 until his retirement in 2014.

Ain was a valued lecturer at the University of Tartu. He taught many economics and computer science courses and, for many years, taught programming to students. For example, he lectured on economic statistics, general statistical theory and systems programming, taught a special course on programming, compilers, automata, programming languages and translators, and supervised seminars on algorithms and data structures. Ain wrote several programming textbooks, the latest of which, 'Programming in Assembler', was published in 2020. He published six monographs and 29 research articles, mainly on computer science. He was also the author or co-author of 25 major programming packages.

According to colleagues, Ain had a highly developed sense of generalisation and ethics. Once, a factory ordered programmes from the University of Tartu's Computer Centre to produce 20 reports. Under Ain's leadership, a unique report generator, VILLIS, was programmed, which completed all the reports with a single review of the original data. As this was a completely new approach at the time, there was a lot of debate within the team. Ain enjoyed a meaningful debate, and colleagues recall that it was good to argue with him - the debate always led to a constructive solution, which resulted in closer friendships of the disputants.

Along with his studies, Ain loved his sports, and became a canoeing champion in 1964 and a member of the Estonian national team from 1962 to1968. 

At this time our thoughts and condolences are with Ain’s family. He will be remembered as an outstanding person and he will be sadly missed by his colleagues and loved ones.