Dennis Gabor, inventor and Nobel Laureate

Gabor was the ideal candidate for the Nobel prize in physics (1971), since Nobel's will mentions the prize is for "inventions". Gabor's holograms, when combined with laser technology, are certainly amazing.

Although we were colleagues in the Dept. of Physics, Imperial College, for 6 years, I never really met him. One might say that another of his inventions is that of wavelets, since the Gabor wave-packets can be regarded as the wavelets (=coherent states) of the oscillator group.