A well-known engineering professor retired from the University last week.

LED inventor Nick Holonyak, Jr., 84, stepped down from his post as the John Bardeen endowed chair in electrical and computer engineering and physics July 31. He’s been a professor at the campus since 1963, a year after he invented to first visible LED while working at General Electric in Syracuse, N.Y.

Holonyak, along with his work, was honored last year at the LED symposium on campus. He was awarded the prestigious Lemelson–MIT Prize in 2004.

In 1963, he predicted in a Reader’s Digest issue that his invention would someday replace Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulbs.

“I told (the reporter) at that time, ‘As far as I’m concerned, since we’re just at the beginning of this, there is a lot more to do and there will be further progress to go further from the red, to the orange, to the yellow, to the green, to the blue and the visible spectrum,'” Holonyak told the Technograph last year.

“And I thought it would be only about 10 years or so to get the next part and the next part. I didn’t realize it would be 50 years, but I had told (the reporter) that we would get to white light. I just didn’t know it would take 50 years.”

He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from the University in 1954.