Professor Laszlo Solymar 1930 - 2026

It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Emeritus Fellow Professor Laszlo Solymar. Laszlo had a long and distinguished academic career in our department, and as a Fellow at Brasenose and Hertford Colleges.

Laszlo Solymar FRS was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary. He earned his degree from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and completed a Ph.D. at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1956. Following the Hungarian Revolution later that year, Laszlo and his wife Marianne escaped to England. He initially worked in industrial research before launching a distinguished academic career at the University of Oxford.

Laszlo arrived at Oxford in 1966 as a Fellow in Engineering at Brasenose College, before moving to Hertford College in 1986 as the Donald Pollock Reader in Engineering Science, later serving as Professor of Applied Electromagnetism.

n entrepreneurial thinker, he also co-founded two tech spin-outs: Microsaic Systems (Imperial College, 2001) and Metaboards (Oxford University, 2017). His academic appointments include visiting professorships at universities in Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrück, Berlin, Madrid, and Budapest and a Visiting Professorship at Imperial College London.

Throughout a research career spanning over seven decades of continuous publication, Professor Solymar conducted foundational, groundbreaking research and is widely recognised within the global scientific community for his pioneering contributions to applied electromagnetism, antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He is best known for formulating the definitive mathematical theories underlying volume holograms; his 1981 textbook, Volume Holography and Volume Gratings, remains an industry classic. In the realm of photorefractive materials, he formulated complete mathematical theories for four-wave mixing and two-beam coupling in crystals. Later, in metamaterials, he explored magnetoinductive waves, wireless power and data transfer and sensing, co-authoring the highly cited textbook Waves in Metamaterials (2009).

Over his long career, his publication record extended to 16 books, including the globally referenced undergraduate textbook Electrical Properties of Materials, currently in its 11th edition, and more than 300 papers in leading scientific journals.

Professor Solymar was a beloved lecturer and educator. Generations of engineering students were raised on his tutorials, lectures, and textbooks, including senior academics active in the department today. Scores of his former research students hold senior academic positions all over the world

Beyond academia, he was an early and fierce advocate for institutional progress. In the late 1960s, he challenged Oxford's identity as a "male fortress," openly pushing for the integration of women into previously all-male colleges—a major structural shift that the university finally began executing in 1974.