Career
He initiated the establishing of the Canadian Geophysical Union in 1974, and served as the Union"s president between 1986 and 1988. He was the first chairman of the United Nations committee for Geodetic Aspects of the Law of the Sea (GALOS), founded in Edinburgh, Scotland by the International Association of Geodesy (IAG) in 1989. His book Geodesy: The Concepts, now translated into several languages, is a standard text for both undergraduate and graduate courses in geodesy worldwide.
He also served as Editor-in-Chief and a reviewer for several scientific journals as well as on numerous scientific boards and committees.
Research One of his main contributions of general relevance is least-squares spectral analysis, also called the Vaníček method, a frequency spectrum computation method published in 1969 and 1971. The method is based on a least-squares fit of sinusoids to the data samples, and mitigates the drawbacks of applying Fourier analysis for analyzing long incomplete data records such as most natural datasets.
His discoveries in theoretical geophysics, the "Precise Geoid Solution" in particular, enable millimetre-to-centimetre accuracy in geoid computation, an-order-of-magnitude improvement from previous solutions.
