Nick Holonyak Jr. an American engineer and educator best known for his 1962 invention of a light-emitting diode (LED) that emitted visible red light instead of infrared light while working at General Electric’s research laboratory in Syracuse, New York is dead.
He died on Sept. 18, 2022 at age 93.
Born to on November 3, 1928 in Zeigler, Illinois to Rusyn immigrants, Holonyak was the first member of his family to receive any type of formal schooling.
He earned his bachelor’s (1950), master’s (1951), doctoral (1954) degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and became a professor at the University of Illinois in 1963.
Ten years after becoming a professor, he was named the John Bardeen Endowed Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
From 1957–1963, he was a scientist at the General Electric Company’s Advanced Semiconductor Laboratory in Syracuse, New York, where he demonstrated the LED on October 9, 1962.
In addition to introducing the III-V alloy LED, Holonyak held 41 patents.