Hermann A. Haus
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
August 8, 1925 - May 21, 2003
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Scientific Discipline: Engineering Sciences Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1987)
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Hermann A. Haus “was considered the world expert on optical and electronic noise,” according to The Tech, the student newspaper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “He introduced the master equation of mode-locking, now the primary analytic tool for understanding pulsed lasers. [And he] made significant contributions to soliton theory, the study of propagation of a laser pulse. At the time of his death, he was leading an effort to develop integrated photonics in the Optics and Quantum Electronics Group of [MIT’s] Research Laboratory for Electronics, where he was a principal investigator.” Haus had been a professor at MIT for 49 years and an Institute Professor there for the last 15.
Born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, Haus and his mother were deported by the country’s communist authorities to Austria shortly after World War II. They settled in Graz, and in 1946 he enrolled in the Technical University there, majoring in power engineering; not long afterward, he transferred to the Technical University of Vienna to study microwave engineering. Haus was then offered a scholarship by Union College (Schenectady, NY), from which he graduated in 1949 with a B.Sc.
While working on his master’s degree at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (Troy, NY), Haus obtained a summer job at MIT with Prof. Louis Smullin, which led to his acceptance in 1951 into the doctoral program of what is now MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He received his Sc.D. in 1954 and joined the department that year. Haus remained based at MIT for his entire career while benefiting from regular sabbaticals, including three at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ.
Haus was known at MIT as an extraordinary teacher both for his course-defining textbooks and his dynamic in-class personality. He would gesture dramatically, convey awe of the subject and the phenomena it explained, and lecture without notes. He lived by a lesson learned on the train from Slovenia to Austria as a young refugee, where a chemistry professor (also a refugee) lamented that he had to leave a career’s worth of research notes behind. Haus then vowed to himself never to rely on anything so complex that he couldn’t keep it in his head.
