Talk:Russell Kirsch

Inventor of the square pixel

There are some articles that claim him to be the inventor of the square pixels. I highly doubt that! The concept of discrete picture elements was already shown around 1880 with independent selenium elements. More on the history can be found in a review of history: G. Shiers: Early schemes for television, IEEE Spectrum, 1970. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.171.182.234 (talk) 11:36, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

I've removed the incorrect claim that Kirsch led SEAC's creation. It was cited but not backed up by its source, there's no evidence for it, and it is chronologically impossible.

This article originally claimed that Kirsch "led a team of colleagues which, between 1947 and 1950, created America’s first internally programmable computer, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC)". This claim that Kirsch led SEAC's creation, which dates from the earliest version of this article, had a citation but was not backed up by the cited source. This source was a 2010 retrospective paper, "Computer Development at the National Bureau of Standards", written by Kirsch himself. But Kirsch's paper, which does discuss SEAC's career, never even claims that he played any part in its initial creation, let alone that he led the development team.

A better source of Kirsch's role is his own biography page at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the successor to the NBS. This shows that he graduated from New York University with his bachelor's degree in 1950, when SEAC was already becoming operational, and that he joined the NBS the following year, in 1951. The page makes no claim that he led the team which built SEAC. He simply joined the team too late to have possibly done so, and furthermore he was still very young when he joined, only around 22. Further evidence is in the NBS report Computer Development (SEAC and DYSEAC) at the National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C., whose introduction mentions the commendation of the team which created SEAC and lists especially significant contributors (see, in particular, pp. 1-2, on pages 5-6 of the PDF file) but makes no mention of Kirsch. --Colin Douglas Howell (talk) 03:52, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Citation for invention of pixel?

I added a "Citation needed" flag to the statement that he "was recognized as the inventor of the pixel". It seems strange that anyone can invent the pixel. It seems to me that a pixel is a natural consequence of raster graphics, and as such surely goes back to the early days of photography? And I note that Kirsh is not mentioned in the Wikipedia article on the Pixel. -- Mike Marchmont (talk) 11:01, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

On 15 August 2020 I removed the claim for "inventing the pixel", which Mr Kirsch surely did not. Citing obituary claims is extremely unreliable, as they are often hagiographic. There's no primary authoritative source to support this claim. Please refer to the comments I made in the article's history. Carrellk (talk) 07:14, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, @Carrellk:. I noticed that you removed the claim on the 15 August. I might have done it myself, but as a fairly new editor I wasn't completely sure. Mike Marchmont (talk) 07:29, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Added to sentence

I added “in images” at the end of the career sentence for edge detection to just make sure people know what edges are being detected. Kmoore28 (talk) 13:47, 10 September 2022 (UTC)