Russell A. Kirsch, z”l, died Aug. 11, 2020, at his home in Portland at age 91. He is survived by his wife of 65 years, Joan; children, Walden (Portland), Peter (Denver, Colo.), Lindsey (Seattle) and Kara (St. Paul, Minn.); and four grandchildren, Nathan, Noah, Gus and Gabrielle
Kirsch, the son of Russian and Hungarian Jewish immigrants, was born in New York City June 20, 1929. 
Kirsch was a pioneering computer scientist who was on the team that built the U.S. government’s first programmable computer (SEAC) in the early 1950s. He is credited with creating the first computer digitally scanned photograph in 1957, a now-famous 176 pixel-square black and white image of his infant son. That first-scanned image is regarded as a foundation for modern digital photography and computer image processing and was included in “100 Photographs that Changed The World” (Time Life Books, 2003). His work in image processing led to such diverse technologies as CAT scans, satellite imaging, desktop publishing and bar codes.
He spent his entire 50-year professional career as a research scientist at the National Institutes of Science and Technology (formerly the U.S. National Bureau of Standards), in Washington, D.C. He headed the Artificial Intelligence Group which, beginning in the late 1960s, worked to bring early AI methods in computer-assisted pattern recognition and image processing to advance a wide variety of fields including cancer detection, biomedical imaging, currency counterfeit detection and archeology. The Kirsch Operator, named for him, is a mathematical algorithm he invented to detect edges in images. His research was widely published in scientific journals and he lectured broadly worldwide.
After retiring, Russell and Joan, an art historian and printmaker, moved to Portland. They pursued research into picture grammars and the work of the artists Richard Diebenkorn and Joan Miro. They also traveled the world photographing and researching cave art in France and petroglyphs in Africa, Europe and the U.S. and brought their respective skills to creating stereoscopic images of these ancient petroglyphs to better understand the nature and sequence of their creation and to help distinguish between ancient drawings from modern imitations.