To register for your free place at this talk, please email Wiesia Hsissen (w.hsissen@imperial.ac.uk). A seminar on holography and its impact will take place before – please see the event page for details.
Abstract
Happy childhood in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Competitive education. Early interest in matters technical.
The First World War, the Red Terror, the White Terror. Exodus from Hungary.
Builds a cathode ray tube. Receives doctorate from the Technische Hochschule, 1927. Absorbs the unique scientific atmosphere of Berlin.
Hitler comes to power. Gabor moves to Rugby, to BTH Research Labs. Joins Imperial as a Reader in 1948, FRS in 1956, Professor in 1958, Nobel Prize in 1971.
Wide interests. Electron lenses, communication theory, acoustics, learning machines, flat TV tube, direct generation of electricity from heat, and the crowning achievement, the discovery of holography.
Biography
Laszlo Solymar was born in Hungary. In 1956 he settled in England. After nine years in British industry he joined the University of Oxford where he is now an Emeritus Professor of Applied Electromagnetism.
During his career he had visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabruck, Berlin, Madrid, Budapest and, since 2000, Imperial College London. He did research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials and metamaterials. He has published seven books (three research books, three textbooks and one popular book) and 300 papers.
In 1992 he received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of the Electrical Engineers and he was elected to the Royal Society in 1995. His further interests are represented by his book on the history of communications, his radio-plays with John Wain on three scientists of the ancient world and his two plays entitled ‘The Rhineland War: 1936’ and ‘The Portrait of a Genius’.