Dennis Gabor

Dennis Gabor (5 June 1900 – 8 February 1979) was a Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist best known for inventing holography, a technique for recording and reconstructing three-dimensional images using interference patterns of light, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971.

Born in Budapest to a Jewish family, Gabor studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Budapest and later at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg, earning his diploma in 1924 and doctorate in 1927. After early work at Siemens & Halske in Germany developing a high-pressure quartz mercury lamp, he fled the rising Nazi regime in 1933 due to his Jewish ancestry and settled in Britain, joining the British Thomson-Houston Company in Rugby. There, in 1948, while seeking to improve electron microscope resolution, he conceived holography—initially termed "wavefront reconstruction"—using inline electron beam interference, though practical optical holograms awaited the laser's invention in 1960.

Dennis Gabor was born Dénes Günszberg on June 5, 1900, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, now Hungary. He was the eldest of three brothers in a family of Jewish origin; his siblings included George, who died in 1935 from pancytopenia, and André, born in 1903. Shortly after his birth, the family converted from Judaism to Lutheranism, and his father changed the surname from Günszberg to Gábor, under which name Dennis would later be known internationally.