Tingye Li

Tingye Li was a Chinese-American scientist who made significant contributions in the fields of microwaves, lasers and optical communications. His innovative work at AT&T pioneered the research and application of lightwave communication, and has had a far-reaching impact on information technology for over four decades. He was also a leader and mentor in the photonics community, and served as the president of the Optical Society of America in 1995. Tingye Li was born on July 7, 1931 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, the eldest son of a diplomat. His father was a senior officer of the Chinese Foreign Ministry (before 1949, the Republic of China) and served as an ambassador to several countries. At the age of 12, Li and his family left China to join his father in Canada. Later they lived in South Africa before eventually settling in the United States. Tingye obtained his bachelor's degree from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his Ph.D. from Northwestern University. After graduating in 1957, he began working at Bell Telephone Laboratories (later AT&T Bell Laboratories), working there for 41 years until his retirement from AT&T Labs in 1998. During his tenure at AT&T, he wrote and contributed to many journal papers, patents, and books in the areas of antennas, microwave propagation, lasers and optical communications. In 1961, he and his colleague A. Gardner Fox published a paper titled Resonant modes in a maser interferometer, which showed that a laser beam bouncing back and forth between a pair of mirrors can resonate for a number of modes of energy distribution and for each of these traverse modes there is a different characteristic phase velocity and attenuation per transit. They used computer simulation techniques to obtain their data. This work was the first to point out that an open-sided resonator containing a laser medium should have unique modes of propagation, which is fundamental to the theory and practice of lasers. This work is now considered a classic and has been cited over 595 times (SCI) since its publication in 1961 until 1979 when Mr. Fox recalled and gave some remarks on their work. From the late 1960s, Li engaged in pioneering research on lightwave technologies and systems, which are now ubiquitously deployed in the telecommunications industry. In the late 1980s, when the whole world's attention on optical communication was still focused on a single-channel high speed solution, he and his team developed the world's first (sparse channel) WDM (Wavelength Division Multiplexing) system at AT&T Bell Labs. Their experiment in 1992 at Roaring Creek turned out to be a roaring success as Li claimed in an interview, allowing 2.5 Gbit s transmission per channel, the highest rate available at the time. The use of WDM and optical amplifiers changed the paradigm of network economics and is considered to be of revolutionary significance (though evolutionary in design) in the history of lightwave communications. Tingye Li was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Photonic Society of Chinese-Americans, and the International Engineering Consortium. He was also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and the Academia Sinica (Taiwan), and a Foreign Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. Li was the recipient of OSA’s John Tyndall Award (1995) and OSA's Frederic Ives Medal Jarus W. Quinn Prize (1997); IEEE’s W.R.G. Baker Prize (1975), David Sarnoff Award (1979), Photonics Award (2004), and Edison Medal (2009); and the 1997 AT&T Science and Technology Medal. He was given the 1981 Alumni Merit Award from Northwestern University, and he received Achievement Awards from the Chinese Institute of Engineers USA (1978), the Chinese-American Academic and Professional Society (1983), and the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans (1998). Tingye Li was married to his wife Edith Wu Li in 1956. They had no children. He died on December 27, 2012, in Snowbird, Utah, due to cardiovascular disease. He was widely respected and admired by his colleagues and friends for his scientific achievements, his leadership, his generosity, and his humor. He was a global force in optical communications and a shining star in the photonics community.