Louis Hodes (June 19, 1934 – June 30, 2008) was an American

mathematician A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

, computer scientist, and

cancer research Cancer research is research into cancer to identify causes and develop strategies for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and cure. Cancer research ranges from epidemiology, molecular bioscience to the performance of clinical trials to evaluate and ...

er.

Early life and computer science work

Louis Hodes got his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University o ...

(B.S.) from the

Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United Sta ...

. He got his

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

(Ph.D.) from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) in 1962, under Hartley Rogers with a thesis on

computability Computability is the ability to solve a problem in an effective manner. It is a key topic of the field of computability theory within mathematical logic and the theory of computation within computer science. The computability of a problem is clo ...

. With John McCarthy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he helped produce the earliest implementations of the programming language Lisp, and under

Marvin Minsky Marvin Lee Minsky (August 9, 1927 – January 24, 2016) was an American cognitive and computer scientist concerned largely with research of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, ...

he did early research on visual

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

in Lisp. He is also credited by some with the idea, and an initial implementation, of

logic programming Logic programming is a programming paradigm which is largely based on formal logic. Any program written in a logic programming language is a set of sentences in logical form, expressing facts and rules about some problem domain. Major logic pro ...

Cancer research

In 1966 he moved into cancer-related research, specifically at

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

and later the

National Cancer Institute The National Cancer Institute (NCI) coordinates the United States National Cancer Program and is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is one of eleven agencies that are part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. ...

where he turned his interest in visual pattern recognition to medical imaging applications. He also worked on efficient algorithms for screening chemical compounds for studying chemical carcinogenesis. His work on models of clustering for chemical compounds was pronounced a "milestone" by the Developmental Therapeutics Program of the National Cancer Institute, for "revolutioniz ngthe selection of compounds of interest by measuring the novelty of a chemical structure by comparing it to known compounds.""Milestone (1981): Hodes model for ranking small molecule structures (sic)", www.cancer.go

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hodes, Louis 1934 births 2008 deaths American computer scientists Artificial intelligence researchers Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni Lisp (programming language) people Scientists from New York City Programming language designers Cancer researchers