Professor Laszlo Solymar FRS 1930-2026

Laszlo Solymar FRS, who held a Visiting Professorship in our department for many years, has died aged 96. His family remembers “a beloved lecturer and educator... always bridging the gap between equations and the humanities”.

We are grateful to Gillian and Lucy, Laszlo’s daughters, for sharing this account of his life.

Laszlo Solymar was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. He earned his degree from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and completed a PhD at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1956. Following the Hungarian Revolution later that year, Laszlo and his wife Marianne escaped to England. He initially worked in industrial research before launching a distinguished academic career at the University of Oxford.    

Laszlo arrived at Oxford in 1966 as a Fellow in Engineering at Brasenose College, before moving to Hertford College in 1986 as the Donald Pollock Reader in Engineering Science, later serving as Professor of Applied Electromagnetism.   

An entrepreneurial thinker, he also co-founded the Oxford University spin-out company Metaboards in 2017. His academic appointments include visiting professorships at universities in Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrück, Berlin, Madrid, and Budapest. After retiring from Oxford, he held a Visiting Professorship in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial for many years.   

Throughout a research career spanning over seven decades of continuous publication, Professor Solymar conducted foundational, groundbreaking research and is widely recognised within the global scientific community for his pioneering contributions to applied electromagnetism, antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He is best known for formulating the definitive mathematical theories underlying volume holograms; his 1981 textbook, Volume Holography and Volume Gratings, remains an industry classic. In the realm of photorefractive materials, he formulated complete mathematical theories for four-wave mixing and two-beam coupling in crystals. Later, in metamaterials, he explored magnetoinductive waves, wireless power and data transfer and sensing, co-authoring the highly cited textbook Waves in Metamaterials (2009).    

Over his long career, his publication record extended to 16 books, including the globally referenced undergraduate textbook Electrical Properties of Materials, currently in its 11th edition, and more than 300 papers in leading scientific journals.    

Professor Solymar was a beloved lecturer and educator. Generations of engineering students were raised on his tutorials, lectures, and textbooks, including senior academics active in the department today. Scores of his former research students hold senior academic positions all over the world.   

Beyond academia, he was an early and fierce advocate for institutional progress. In the late 1960s, he challenged Oxford's identity as a "male fortress," openly pushing for the integration of women into previously all-male colleges — a major structural shift that the university finally began executing in 1974.   

For his contributions to engineering, Laszlo was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1995 and received the prestigious Faraday Medal from the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE, now the IET) in 1992.    

Always bridging the gap between equations and the humanities, Laszlo collaborated with Oxford's Professor of Poetry, John Wain. Together, they co-authored three radio plays about ancient mathematicians and philosophers, which were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1991.    

In later years, he became an active essayist and cultural contributor, publishing over a hundred articles and several books on history, politics, and civilisations.   

Laszlo is survived by his daughters, Gillian and Lucy, four grandchildren, two step-grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.