Innovator in Artificial Intelligence Created 'Pleasing' Pastel Portraits

As a teenager, Louis Hodes studied computers at a math and science honors high school in New York. Fascinated by the subject, he decided to build his own device.

He salvaged tubing and other materials he needed from an industrial area in the city, wired everything together and connected it to batteries. The results encouraged the determined child prodigy.

"It was a machine that was able to compute things," said his brother Alan Nathan Hodes, who for a time followed his older brother's interest in computers.

For more than 50 years, through the dawning of the computer age and into development of computers for cancer research, Dr. Hodes pursued his fascination with the machines' intricacies and capabilities. He conducted groundbreaking work in artificial intelligence, helped develop a computer programming language and saved the lives of thousands of animals being used for scientific testing with a computer model he created.

He was an unassuming man known for his stubbornness and brilliance: a man not quite satisfied that he had done enough.

Dr. Hodes, a mathematician and research scientist at the National Institutes of Health who later became a portrait painter, died June 30 of pulmonary failure at Suburban Hospital. The Rockville resident was 74. He lived a full and enthusiastic life despite having a nervous system that failed to communicate information adequately from his brain to his spinal cord.

Peripheral neuropathy took away his balance and "caused him to walk as if on a tightrope," said his wife of 40 years, Susan Hodes. Over time, his childhood limp gave way to his using a cane, a walker and, despite his stubborn resistance, a wheelchair. The trembling in his hands made painting his pastel portraits, which he started 10 years ago, difficult but not impossible.

"It was amazing how he did it," said his longtime friend Jack Minker. "He would lean up against the easel, steadying his hand that way, and he painted. It was not easy."

His drawings, portraits and figures were poetic works, said Joanie Grosfeld, who began taking life drawing classes with the Hodeses more than 35 years ago at the Jewish Community Center in Rockville.

"He just had a sensitivity to his drawing. He would use a white highlight, instead of the dark line and shadow," she said. "The lines just flowed. They were just pleasing to look at . . . there was a lot of feeling to the faces."

Born into a poor family in New York City, Louis Hodes grew up on the city's Lower East Side in the first public housing complex in Manhattan. His intelligence was evident early in his life. He did complicated math problems as a child and, at 13, while studying for his bar mitzvah, he learned Hebrew, going beyond the words he would speak as part of the traditional rite of passage.

He received a scholarship to Stuyvesant High School, where he fed his appetite for math and science. He graduated summa cum laude from what was then Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked at the post office to pay for college.