Elliot Quincy Adams

Elliot Quincy Adams was born 13 September 1888, and attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studying chemical engineering under Gilbert N. Lewis, who remarked that "the two most profound scientific minds, among the people he had known, were those of E [lliot] Q Adams and Albert Einstein."D S Tarbell, "Elliot Quincy Adams (1888-1971): From dipolar ions to fluorescent lights." "Journal of Chemical Education," 67:7-8 (1990).]

Adams as a color scientist

Adams made a seminal contribution to color science in his 1942 paper, "X-Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry."E. Q. Adams, "X-Z planes in the 1931 I.C.I. system of colorimetry," "Journal of the Optical Society of America", 32:3, p 168-173 (March, 1942).] In this paper, he provides two models for perceptually uniform color spaces. One, which he termed "chromatic value," was the precursor of the modern CIELAB uniform color space; the other, which he termed "chromatic valence," was the direct ancestor of the Hunter Lab color space, and provided the elements of today's CIELUV. This paper showed how relatively simple transformations from XYZ of Munsell colors can have relatively uniform spacing of hue and chroma.

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