Abstract

Many of us profited professionally from Emmett’s Leith’s work. Our careers were born out of his ideas. Many others indirectly benefited after his research made holography popular. An example is Dennis Gabor. By the time of the Lieth and Upatnieks OSA papers, he had more or less abandoned holography, believing that there was no way to avoid the debilitating conjugate image. Prior to those papers, holography lacked practical utility and may not have been considered as a worthwhile subject for the Nobel Prize which Gabor received in 1971.

© 2006 Optical Society of America