Li Tianye (厉鼎毅) can be thought of as he who speeded up the Internet by a factor of 100 during the 1990s, and a man capable of giving entertaining speeches on the most mundane of technical subjects, altogether an unusual calling for the son of a Chinese diplomat.
Born in Nanjing on 7 July, 1931, Li’s path in life would have been very different were it not for the fact his father was a senior officer in the then Chinese Foreign Ministry. Assigned to South Africa, it was there that Li’s destiny took shape, with his graduating from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, with a bachelor’s degree from the School of Electrical and Information Engineering.
Li’s next stop was to be Northwestern University in Illinois, USA, whereupon graduating he commenced work at AT&T, then Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he would remain for 41 years, rising to preeminence in his chosen fields of microwaves, lasers and optical communications.
The big break came in 1961, when Li coauthored a paper with his colleague, A. Gardner Fox, entitled “Resonant modes in a maser interferometer” that was published by The Bell System Technical Journal. Regarded now as a classic that is also fundamental to the theory and practice of lasers, the work had been cited over 595 times by 1979.
Fibre optics became Li’s next focus, with he and his team performing a 1992 experiment that became known as the “Roaring Success”, given it was conducted in Roaring Creek, Pennsylvania, USA.
Therein, Li sought to employ Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers and amplified Wavelength Division Multiplexing systems that allowed more channels to be placed on a single fibre; until that point, all optical communications utilised only one channel, a technique that had been around since the 1980s.
The result was 2.5 Gbit/s of transmission per channel, an outstanding acceleration of communication capabilities that helped make the IT industry what it is today; a revolution in high-speed, long-distance communication equating to an upgrade in capacity by a factor of 100.
Now a US national, such a zenith in his career was to make Li the very first foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, while in 1995 he was also elected President of the Optical Society of America for his outstanding contribution and spirit of service.
An antipathy of the stereotypical boring scientist persona, Li became affectionately known as “Uncle Tianye” by many of the younger colleagues whom he mentored, while a talk he gave at a 2001 conference carried the title, “Crouching Technologies and Hidden Profits”.
In addition to his extraordinary gifts made to the telecommunications industry, Li is also remembered for some of his many notable quotes, including “Photonics is a 40-year overnight success” and “Good physicists upgrade themselves into system engineers”.
Survived by his wife, Edith Wu (吴修惠), with whom he lived in Boulder, Colorado, USA, Li passed away on 27 December, 2012.
