David L. MacAdam

1962 OSA President David Lewis MacAdam was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, on 1 July 1910. He received a B.S. from Lehigh University in 1932 and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1936. He joined the Bartol Research Laboratory in 1932, and was a teaching fellow at MIT while working on his doctorate. In 1936, he joined Eastman Kodak’s research laboratory. His specialty was color measurement and applications to color photography and television. He was a U.S. expert on colorimetry for the International Commission on Illumination in 1968.

MacAdam retired from Kodak in 1975 and for the next 20 years was a professor in the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester.

Active in the optics community, MacAdam was editor of JOSA from 1961to 1965 and a member of the Intersociety Color Council and AIP’s Board of Governors. Along with Arthur C. Hardy, MacAdam wrote the Handbook of Colorimetry and The Science of Color.

He received OSA’s Adolph Lomb Medal, the Frederick Ives/Jarus Quinn Award, and AIP’s Newton Medal. He was the Mattiello Memorial Lecturer of the Federation of Societies for Paint Technology, Hurter and Driffield Memorial Lecturer, and Royal Photographic Society, London Lecturer. He was also an OSA Fellow.

In 1996, the Center for Electronic Imaging Systems, Rochester Institute for Technology, and the University of Rochester sponsored a conference, Horizons in Color Science: A Tribute to David L. MacAdam.

David L. MacAdam died on 9 March 1998.