Mathematician/Inventor Samuel M. Genensky Dies at 81

August 10, 2009

Mathematician Samuel M. Genensky, a well-known inventor of sight-assisting devices and an advocate for the blind, died June 26 at the age of 81.

Genensky had lost most of his vision at birth because of a medical mishap. Forced to adapt, he exhibited initiative and spirit his whole life. In a high school geometry class, for example, young Genensky used his father's World War I binoculars to identify circles and triangles on the blackboard. When he later placed a +3.5 diopter lens on the left objective lens, he created a kind of giant bifocal system that allowed him to see the blackboard through the right side, and use the left side to do the mathematics. Genensky used this system through schooling and in the mathematics department of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, Calif.

As an undergraduate at Brown University in the postwar years, Genensky had asked only that he be allowed to take tests in a room that had good lighting, and to sit at a desk of acceptable height. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University.

"When the partially blind went out in the world," Genensky had said, "they found that they either got no services at all or services that were appropriate." Neither alternative, he indicated, made much sense. It was at Rand that he, colleagues, and scientists from the Aerospace Corporation and the Polaroid Corporation, designed and built the first practical closed-circuit television so that partially sighted people could read small print. The system was demonstrated in late 1968 at annual gathering of the American Academy of Optometry. In January 1971, Reader's Digest called it "Sam Genensky's Marvelous Seeing Machine," and it attracted a flood of attention and a new job at the Santa Monica Hospital where he would help create the Center for the Partially Sighted.

Another innovation from Genensky's two decades at the Rand Corporation was the creation of a triangle-shaped sign that identified the men's room and a circle-shaped sign that identified the women's room. Genensky's idea became the standard for marking public restrooms in California - years before Federal requirements.

In 1993, when scar tissue began to cloud his "good" right eye, Genensky underwent a cornea transplant, cataract removal, and pupil reshaping. A new world briefly opened up, especially in the perception of color: Genensky saw that his Jewish wife was a redhead!

Source: LA Times, July 12