Holography Pioneer Passes Away

Hal-9001 writes "The New York Times has an article on Emmett Leith, professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan and inventor of three-dimensional holography, who passed away on Dec. 23, 2005. Professor Leith and his coworker Juris Upatnieks displayed the world's first three-dimensional hologram at a conference of the Optical Society of America in 1964."

Comments

A history of holography

[k-zed]

Here's an article about the history of holography:
http://www.holophile.com/history.htm
Besides Leith and others, it mentions Dennis Gabor, who originally developed the theory behind it all, in 1947.

Good teacher, great hologram collection

[mfago]

I was lucky enough to have Prof Leith teach my optics class at Michigan about 10 years ago. At one point, he took the entire class over to his lab to show his latest work as well as share his outstanding personal holography collection. Still recall the 20"x30" self-portrait he received from a Soviet scientist: amazingly crisp and clear (used Dichromated gelatin rather than film). Always had stories to tell...

Re:sad news :(

[Hal-9001]

Sad, yes, but to correct the submission:

inventor of three-dimensional holography

No, as the article says, Dennis Gabor invented holography and coined the term "hologram", in 1948.

My original statement is correct because of the words I have emphasized in bold face. Gabor only made holograms of two-dimensional objects (specifically of a transparency of the words "Hugyens", "Young", and "Fresnel" and of a transparent protractor). Admittedly part of the reason for this was because of the lack of a light source with the coherence length available from a laser, but part of the reason is because his method of recording holograms had a serious problem known as the "twin-image" problem. As a result, the development of holography stagnated until Prof. Leith invented a method for solving this problem. If you want to play semantic games regarding the exact meaning of the word "inventor", go ahead, but it is an indisputable fact that Leith and Upatnieks demonstrated the first three-dimensional hologram.

There's a reason Gabor won a Nobel prize.

I don't dispute this, but there is a less fortunate reason why Prof. Leith did not receive a share of the prize. A professor at Michigan who had a personal dislike for Prof. Leith (and who in fact tried repeatedly to steal credit for work that had actually been done by Prof. Leith) actively campaigned against giving Prof. Leith a share of the Nobel Prize. Despite this, Prof. Leith is actually mentioned by name in the speech awarding the Nobel Prize to Gabor, a highly-unusual (if not unique) occurrence in the history of the Nobel Prize.