“If I’m dangerous, maybe the girls will notice me!” quips Yuri Denisyuk, proudly displaying the Cyrillic Danger: Laser Radiation sign presented to him by the local Coherent Laser sales rep at his first visit to Lake Forest College in 1989. This is my favorite image of one the great gods of Mt. Holympus, personified as everyone’s favorite grandfather with a wacky sense of humor. After all, it was a science fiction story that inspired him to invent his own style of wavefront reconstruction!
Click on the link below to find out the name of the book and its author.
Here is his way in holography.
Here is an appreciation of Denisyuk's accomplishments by Sean Johnston.
His seminal paper, referencing only Gabor and Lippmann.
And another one, "On The Reproduction of the Optical Properties of an Object by the Wave Field of Its Scattered Radiation". Although both of these papers were published in 1962, his experiments began in 1958.
To show my appreciation of Denisyuk, I made an enhanced cover of his book, Fundamentals of Holography, published by Mir Press. It is a very well written book about the theory and applications of holography, and Denisyuk uses a Russian nesting doll, a Matryuska, as part of his illustrations.
When I first met him, at the time the picture above was taken, and he found out I had an infant son, he gave my family one of those dolls! A treasured family heirloom to be sure! So I made a multi-color hologram of the innermost doll, and framed it in a facsimile of the cover of the book. I gave a copy of it to his son, Igor when I met him at the International Symposium on Display Holography in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2015.
