Campus set to honor LED inventor Holonyak

Nick Holonyak Jr. does not shy away from a challenge, especially in science.So when chemists at General Electric criticized his approach to making lasers back in 1962, he responded directly and, in his mind, appropriately."They were telling me I was nuts in pretty foul language — New York language — and I was giving it back in language from the coal fields of southern Illinois," Holonyak remembered with a laugh last week.Holonyak, now one of the University of Illinois' most recognized scientists, proved his critics wrong and found a new alloy that would emit light in the red part of the visible spectrum, creating the first practical light-emitting diode.
Fifty years later the incredible fruits of his discovery are everywhere — from laptop screens and digital clocks to medical instruments, Christmas tree bulbs and spacecraft. His work led to dimmer switches, the lasers that make CD and DVD players possible, and fiber-optic communication networks.Holonyak, 83, who holds the John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics, will be honored by the campus Tuesday to mark the 50th anniversary of his invention of the first practical LED. A symposium on Oct. 24-25 at the I Hotel will bring together Nobel laureates to discuss his work.Tuesday's celebration at the Illini Union, scheduled for 11 a.m., will include enough cake for 500 people, a separate cake with LED candles and a talk by Holonyak. The first 100 guests will receive a copy of a Holonyak documentary called "A Brilliant Idea."
"Our lives today are marked by everything he has contributed," said Professor Andreas Cangellaris, head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. "Sometimes people don't even have a clue that many of the great things that they are enjoying go back to Nick's thinking about how do you make wild things happen."For Holonyak, that's what it's all about. Thinking. Ideas. Hard work.Coincidentally, Tuesday is the day the Nobel Prize in Physics is to be announced. Holonyak won't be waiting by the phone. He's won just about every other science, technology or engineering prize there is. He'd just as soon be in the lab.Russ DuPuis, a noted engineering professor at Georgia Tech and one of Holonyak's former graduate students, started a Nobel campaign for his mentor last year. DuPuis and others argue that Holonyak should have won in 2000, when the Nobel committee recognized Herbert Kroemer and Zhores Alferov for their development of semiconductor "heterostructures" and Jack Kilby, another UI engineering alumnus, for his part in creating the integrated circuit.