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Jozef Cohen died on August 18, 1995, just at the time when his magnum opus on vision science was about to come to fruition, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship and research. While the completion of that work continues in production in the hands of others, the loss of its primary author is keenly felt.1 Jozef Cohen was born on July 21, 1921 in Brookline, Massachusetts. He attended school there before he went off to do his undergraduate work in psychology at the University of Maine and then transferred to the University of Chicago. That university had been the center for and still bore traces of Chicago Functionalism, the school of psychological thought that was created to deal with the functions of consciousness, what mind does for us. This was a fitting place for Cohen to get his undergraduate degree since he had a practical view of things. He always had his eyes open for what the pure principles of science do for us.
Graduating from Chicago in 1942, Cohen went to Cornell University for graduate work as a Susan Linn Sage Fellow. There he met Karl M. Dallenbach, who still represented the line of staunch experimentalism he had learned from Edward Bradford Titchener (founder of Cornell's department of psychology) and whose purist Structuralism had sought the exhaustive analysis of mental states for the pure joy of scientific understanding. At Cornell, Cohen exercised his penchant for meticulous science. He would consider himself as a psychophysicist and listed himself as such in Who's Who in America, rather than as a psychologist. The term "psychophysicist" deals with the relationship between objects in the physical world and our consciousness of them. This is exactly what Cohen dealt with in his experimental work.
It was at Cornell that Cohen began researching in two areas that would lead him eventually to his work in vision science and finally "Matrix R." They were constancy phenomena in vision and tristimulus representations of color mixtures. His papers titled "A Nomograph for the Brunswik Ratio" (Cohen & Quinn, 1946) and "A Transformation Matrix of Color Mixture Data" (Cohen & Walker, 1946) are representative of these lines of research. The first was concerned with the development of a nomograph for the calculation of the...