Louis Hodes

Who was Louis Hodes?

Louis Hodes was an American mathematician, computer scientist and cancer researcher. He got his PhD under Hartley Rogers with a thesis on computability. With John McCarthy, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he helped produce the earliest implementations of LISP, and under Marvin Minsky he did early research on visual pattern recognition in LISP. He is also credited by some with the idea, and an initial implementation, of logic programming.

In 1966 he moved into cancer-related research, specifically at National Institutes of Health and later the National Cancer Institute 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[ing] the selection of compounds of interest by measuring the novelty of a chemical structure by comparing it to known compounds."