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Former IFTF Board member Charles Kao wins Nobel Prize for Physics
Former IFTF board member Charles Kao has won the Nobel Prize in physics for his pioneering work in fiber optics, it was announced last week. Kao's work on fiber optics for telecommunications in the mid-1960s brought the art of sending information through pure glass fibers to where it is today—with over 6 million miles of fiber optic cables circling the globe, carrying telephone calls and Internet traffic across countries and oceans. Charles Kao served as a member of the IFTF Board of Trustees just as the Institute was doing its first forecasts in China in the mid-1990’s and through the period when having a China lens on all of our forecasts became very important. Charles provided a very important transdisciplinary foresight for the Institute’s research at the intersection of technology and international shifts in and around China. His humble strength provided an important contribution to the Institute’s Ten-Year Forecast and Technology Horizons Programs. Kao was born in Shanghai and studied in the UK, receiving his PhD in electrical engineering from Imperial College London. Kao told the UK newspaper The Guardian that he was "absolutely speechless and never expected such an honor." He went on to say, "the Nobel has never been given out for applied sciences before. This is very very unexpected. Fibre optics has changed the world of information so much in these last 40 years. It certainly is due to the fibre-optical networks that the news has travelled so fast." For more information: Nobelprize.org The Guardian