Off-axis 홀로그램을 고안한 사람이고 사실 노벨상 수상자인 Gabor 보다 뛰어났다고 볼 수 있는 사람.



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In memoriam: Emmett Leith

30 December 2005



Holography pioneer Emmett Leith died suddenly on 23 December 2005 after suffering a stroke. He was born in 1927 and received the BS and MS in physics and the PhD in electrical engineering, all from Wayne State University, Michigan, and also an honorary Doctor of Science degree from University of Aberdeen. He had worked at the University of Michigan since 1952.



His research was in the areas of synthetic aperture radar, optical processing and holography. His work on optical information processing of synthetic aperture radar data led him to independently discover the principles of holography in the mid-1950s. Leith made this development unaware of the work of Dennis Gabor, who approximately eight years earlier had proposed "in-line" holography.



Numerous applications of holography developed from the work of Leith. In 1962, working with Juris Upatnieks, Leith produced the first three-dimensional laser transmission hologram, of a toy train and a bird.



Leith authored or coauthored about 200 papers. He was named a Fellow of SPIE in 1985. He received the Society's Gold Medal in 1990, and the Dennis Gabor Award in 1983. He was also a member of the National Academy of Engineering.



Charles M. Vest, professor of mechanical engineering and president emeritus of the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology, said that Leith was "one of the most inventive and unique individuals I have ever known. His scientific reasoning was based on an remarkable ability to visualize the physics of whatever he was working on in deceptively simple ways."



Vest recalled a meeting with Leith after the two had not seen each other for a long time. He mentioned an article of Leith's that he had seen published some years earlier on the history of the Willow Run Laboratory, and asked if it would be possible to get a copy of it sometime.



"Emmett said 'Sure,' reached into his pants pocket, pulled out a copy of the article and handed it to me."



Leith and Yuri Denisyuk were honored with the publication of a tribute volume entitled The Art and Science of Holography (H. J. Caulfield, editor) in 2004. In it, the late Steve Benton wrote that Leith was always "a generous supporter of display holography throughout the modern history of the field."



http://spie.org/Announcements/2005.html#Leith