John Hygelund Returns Unicorn's Horn to the Kingdom of Lambert Using Optical Sciences

Congratulations to John Hygelund on winning the International Optical Design Conference (IODC) Illumination Contest with Optica. IODC was held June 4th-8th 2023 in Quebec City, Canada where over 400 participants shared ideas on optics related design.

As part of the opportunity to interact with peers, results for a lens and illumination contest (announced at the SPIE optics conference in August 2022) were presented at IODC. This year’s illumination problem was “The Unicorn’s Horn”.

The challenge's advertisement begins with an abstract that could be something out of Harry Potter.

The evil sorcerer Étendue has returned. He has teleported the unicorn to the Land of Unity and separated the unicorn’s horn. The Kingdom of Lambert will wither without the unicorn. Five members of The Illumination Guild obtained clues for how to reattach the unicorn’s horn. The people of Lambert are calling all illumination wizards and apprentices to assist in this epic quest. Can you help the Lambertians?

After the Illumination Guild's (i.e. conference committee's) careful review, John was found to have the best concept to save the magical world earning him both the awards for apprentice (i.e. student) and wizard (i.e. non-student) prizes. 

John is a Wyant College distance learning student pursuing his MS and working with Prof. José Sasián. He said, “I was very surprised! I took a simple ‘out of the box’ approach to the problem which did the best job of reattaching the horn. Hats off to the other contestants who submitted some very impressive and sophisticated designs.”

Congratulations, John! We are sure the people of the Kingdom of Lambert are eternally grateful for your heroic efforts!