By Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 3, 2008

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.

A doctoral student of great focus and discipline, he specialized in mathematical logic at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1957 to 1962. There, he worked with some of the brightest minds in theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, including Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy.

"Working with McCarthy and Minsky was no mean feat," Minker said. "He did very good work with them. He was in the forefront of history."

As a research assistant, Dr. Hodes took part in the pioneering work being done in the development of the computer programming language LISP, used in artificial intelligence research. He was one of the first people to recognize that logic could be used as a programming language.

After joining NIH's National Cancer Institute in 1966, Dr. Hodes worked on computer tools in biomedical applications, including developing software for online analysis of biomedical images.

One of his two patents included a method that allowed radiologists to calculate the dosage and location for treatment of tumors.

In the 1980s, the "Hodes clustering model" revolutionized how substances and other compounds were screened to treat cancer. His system helped scientists save the lives of thousands of mice that would no longer be needed in experiments, for which a Canadian humane society gave him a commendation.

As much as Dr. Hodes was a patient researcher and diligent mathematician, he also was a doting uncle who showered his nieces and nephews with attention, gifts and encouragement.

Gail Elizabeth Hodes Plotnik recalled her Uncle Louie buying her a telescope and sending her to an exclusive ballet camp. She remembers him as someone witha ready smile and a determination to do as much as he could. "If you talked to him, he probably felt it wasn't nearly enough [and that] maybe he could have done more."