Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor
File:Dennis Gabor.jpg
Born	(1900-06-05)5 June 1900 Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary
Died	London, England
Citizenship	Hungarian / British
Fields	Electrical engineering Physics
Institutions	Imperial College London British Thomson-Houston
Alma mater	Technical University of Berlin Technical University of Budapest
Doctoral students	Eric Ash
Known for	Holography Gabor filter Gabor limit Gabor transform Gabor atom Gabor wavelet
Notable awards	FRS (1956) Young Medal and Prize (1967) Rumford Medal (1968) IEEE Medal of Honor (1970) Nobel Prize in Physics (1971)
Spouse	Marjorie Louise Butler (m. 1936; his death 1971)

Dennis Gabor CBE, FRS (/ˈɡɑːbɔːr, ɡəˈbɔːr/; Hungarian: Gábor Dénes; 5 June 1900 – 9 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist, most notable for inventing holography, for which he later received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Biography

He was born as Günszberg Dénes, into a Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary. In 1918, his family converted to Lutheranism. Denis was the first-born son of Günszberg Bernát and Jakobovits Adél. Despite having a religious background, religion played a minor role in his later life and he considered himself agnostic. In 1902, the family received permission to change their surname from Günszberg to Gábor. He served with the Hungarian artillery in northern Italy during World War I. He studied at the Technical University of Budapest from 1918, later in Germany, at the Charlottenburg Technical University in Berlin, now known as the Technical University of Berlin. At the start of his career, he analysed the properties of high voltage electric transmission lines by using cathode-beam oscillographs, which led to his interest in electron optics. Studying the fundamental processes of the oscillograph, Gabor was led to other electron-beam devices such as electron microscopes and TV tubes. He eventually wrote his PhD thesis on Recording of Transients in Electric Circuits with the Cathode Ray Oscillograph in 1927, and worked on plasma lamps.

In 1933, Gabor fled from Nazi Germany, where he was considered Jewish and was invited to Britain to work at the development department of the British Thomson-Houston company in Rugby, Warwickshire. During his time in Rugby, he met Marjorie Louise Butler, and they married in 1936. He became a British citizen in 1946, and it was while working at British Thomson-Houston that he invented holography, in 1947. He experimented with a heavily filtered mercury arc light source. However, the earliest hologram was only realised in 1964 following the 1960 invention of the laser, the first coherent light source. After this, holography became commercially available.

Gabor's research focused on electron inputs and outputs, which led him to the invention of re-holography. The basic idea was that for perfect optical imaging, the total of all the information has to be used; not only the amplitude, as in usual optical imaging, but also the phase. In this manner a complete holo-spatial picture can be obtained. Gabor published his theories of re-holography in a series of papers between 1946 and 1951.

Gabor also researched how human beings communicate and hear; the result of his investigations was the theory of granular synthesis, although Greek composer Iannis Xenakis claimed that he was actually the first inventor of this synthesis technique. Gabor's work in this and related areas was foundational in the development of time–frequency analysis.

In 1948 Gabor moved from Rugby to Imperial College London, and in 1958 became professor of Applied Physics until his retirement in 1967. His inaugural lecture on 3 March 1959, "Electronic Inventions and their Impact on Civilisation" provided inspiration for Norbert Wiener's treatment of self-reproducing machines in the penultimate chapter in the 1961 edition of his book Cybernetics.

In 1963 Gabor published Inventing the Future which discussed the three major threats Gabor saw to modern society: war, overpopulation and the Age of Leisure. The book contained the now well-known expression that "the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented." Reviewer Nigel Calder rephrased the concept as, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Others such as Alan Kay, Peter Drucker, and Forrest Shaklee who have used various forms of the quote have been incorrectly credited with coining it. His next book, Innovations: scientific, technological, and social which was published in 1970, expanded on some of the topics he had already earlier touched upon, and also pointed to his interest in technological innovation as mechanism of both liberation and destruction.

In 1971 he was the single recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with the motivation "for his invention and development of the holographic method" and presented the history of the development of holography from 1948 in his Nobel lecture.

While spending much of his retirement in Italy at Lavinio Rome, he remained connected with Imperial College as a Senior Research Fellow and also became Staff Scientist of CBS Laboratories, in Stamford, Connecticut; there, he collaborated with his lifelong friend, CBS Labs' president Dr. Peter C. Goldmark in many new schemes of communication and display. One of Imperial College's new halls of residence in Prince's Gardens, Knightsbridge is named Gabor Hall in honour of Gabor's contribution to Imperial College. He developed an interest in social analysis and published The Mature Society: a view of the future in 1972. He also joined the Club of Rome and supervised a working group studying energy sources and technical change. The findings of this group was published in the report Beyond the Age of Waste in 1978, a report which was an early warning of several issues that only later received widespread attention.

Following the rapid development of lasers and a wide variety of holographic applications (e.g., art, information storage, and the recognition of patterns), Gabor achieved acknowledged success and worldwide attention during his lifetime. He received numerous awards besides the Nobel Prize.

Gabor died in a nursing home in South Kensington, London, on 9 February 1979. In 2006 a blue plaque was put up on No. 79 Queen's Gate in Kensington, where he lived from 1949 until the early 1960s.

Awards and honors

Gabor won numerous awards including:

• 1956 – Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS)
• 1964 – Honorary Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences
• 1964 – D.Sc., University of London
• 1967 – Young Medal and Prize, for distinguished research in the field of optics
• 1967 – Colombus Award of the International Institute for Communications, Genoa
• 1968 – The first Albert A. Michelson Medal from The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia
• 1968 – Rumford Medal of the Royal Society
• 1970 – Honorary Doctorate, University of Southampton
• 1970 – Medal of Honor of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• 1970 – Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
• 1971 – Nobel Prize in Physics, for his invention and development of the holographic method
• 1971 – Honorary Doctorate, Delft University of Technology
• 1972 – Holweck Prize of the Société Française de Physique
• Dennis-Gabor-Straße in Potsdam is named in his honour and is the location of the Potsdamer Centrum für Technologie.
• 2009 – Imperial College London opens Gabor Hall, a hall of residence named in his honour

The International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE) presents its Dennis Gabor Award annually, "in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive wavefront technologies, especially those which further the development of holography and metrology applications."

The NOVOFER Foundation of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences annually presents its International Dennis Gabor Award, for outstanding young scientists researching in the fields of physics and applied technology.

The Gabor Medal is awarded by the Royal Society of London for "acknowledged distinction of interdisciplinary work between the life sciences with other disciplines".

In popular culture

• On 5 June 2010, the logo for the Google website was drawn to resemble a hologram in honour of Dennis Gabor's 110th birthday.
• In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Hal suggests that "Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist."

External links

• Short biography
• Gabor's Nobel Prize lecture
• Nobel Prize presentation speech by Professor Erik Ingelstam of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences
• Biography at the Wayback Machine (archived 27 July 2008)