Dennis Gabor, 5 June 1900 - 9 February 1979

Abstract

Dennis Gabor, originally in Hungarian Gábor Dénes, scientist, engineer, inventor, humanist, Nobel Prize winner, was born in Hungary on 5 June 1900, came to England in 1934, married Marjorie Louise Butler in 1936 and, after a life of brilliant scientific and philosophical achievement coupled with great happiness, died in London on 9 February 1979. To use his own words he was “one of the lucky physicists who have been able to see one of their ideas grow into a sizeable chapter of physics”, a chapter he continued to enlarge up to the onset of illness in 1974, and in addition he applied his penetrating intellect to some of the problems of man’s survival, problems created by the advance of technology: in a series of books and discourses he—to use again his own words— “invented a future,—and a good one,—one that preserves the values of civilization and yet is in harmony with man’s nature—based on hope and the love of life”. Few scientists are masters of the ‘two cultures’, but this, Dennis Gabor certainly was.