Digital Imaging Pioneer Russell Kirsch Dies at 91
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Digital imaging pioneer Russell Kirsch dies at 91 - TechCrunch:
Russell Kirsch, whose research going back to the '50s underlies the entire field of digital imaging, died earlier this week at the age of 91. It's hard to overstate the impact of his work, which led to the first digitally scanned photo and the creation of what we now think of as pixels.
Born to Russian and Hungarian immigrant parents in 1929, Kirsch attended NYU, Harvard and MIT, eventually landing a job at the National Bureau of Standards (later the National Institutes of Science and Technology) that he would keep for the rest of his working life.
Although he researched, coded and theorized for 50 years and even after his retirement, his most famous accomplishment is no doubt the first scanned digital image - decades before the first digital camera.
[...] This foundational work led directly to the creation of methods, algorithms and storage techniques for digital images that would inform decades of computer science. Kirsch continued his work on early AI right up until retirement, and even then continued tinkering with his idea of adaptive pixels that would enable much clearer images at lower resolutions. The idea has merit, naturally, though memory and bandwidth aren't quite the bottlenecks they once were.
Throughout his life Kirsch and his wife, who survives him with their children, were also travelers, climbers and artists. No doubt his rich life contributed to his important work and vice versa.
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