Abraham Nemeth

Abraham Nemeth (16 October 1918 – 2 October 2013) was an American mathematician, blind from birth, who created the Nemeth Braille Code for Mathematics and Science Notation — the code that let blind people read, write, and compute mathematics and remains the standard for technical braille in North America. He devised it as a private shorthand while squeezing mathematics courses in around his day jobs, presented it to a national braille committee in 1951, saw it published in 1952 and formally adopted in the United States by 1956 — and was still revising it when he died at ninety-four.^[1]

He was also a professor for thirty years at the University of Detroit, where he taught sighted students at the blackboard from memory, founded the university's graduate computer-science program, and built the spoken-mathematics conventions that became MathSpeak. His working life was an argument he summarized himself: "expect from a blind child what you expect from a sighted child."^[2]

The Lower East Side

Nemeth was born on 16 October 1918 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, into a large family of Yiddish-speaking Hungarian Jewish immigrants. He was blind from infancy.^[3] His parents had no formal education and no prior knowledge of blindness — but, as he recalled, "an innate understanding of what was necessary to raise a blind child." They did not overprotect him. His father taught orientation the way he walked: narrating corners, compass turns, and the direction of traffic, and encouraging the boy to trace the raised characters on mailboxes, fire hydrants, and police call boxes — which is how Nemeth learned the alphabet. His mother sent him on memorized errands to the corner grocery — which his grandfather kept — to train his memory. His father even bought him a tricycle: ride around the block, make a right at every corner, come home. He did.^[4]

His education was, for its era, unusual: New York City's public schools kept a resource room for blind children in one school per borough, and P.S. 110 in Manhattan was within walking distance of his home. He attended regular classes for academic subjects and went to the resource room for braille and typing. He also attended the Jewish Guild for the Blind's school in Yonkers for part of his schooling; since no Hebrew braille yet existed, he learned Biblical and Talmudic material by listening to his grandfather read aloud — a gap he would later close himself, by inventing Hebrew braille.^[6]

Arithmetic to algebra — the long way around

The record contains a confession that flatters no one: by eighth grade, the future mathematician had fallen behind his classmates in arithmetic. Entering Evander Childs High School in the Bronx, he met a resource teacher who also taught regular mathematics courses; the teacher remedied the entire elementary-school deficit in one year, and Nemeth finished with top marks in first-year algebra — and a settled ambition to teach mathematics.^[7]

At Brooklyn College he asked to major in mathematics. His guidance counselors refused it as impossible for a blind student — notation too specialized, readers too hard to recruit, employment hopeless — and, by his own account, "being compliant, I backed down." He graduated in 1940 with a B.A. in psychology — having nonetheless completed electives in analytic geometry, differential and integral calculus, modern geometry, and statistics — and took an M.A. in psychology from Columbia University in 1942.^[8]

Seven years of piece-work

A psychology master's in the wartime economy bought Nemeth only unskilled work. He ran a sewing machine, seaming and hemming pillowcases at piece-work rates, and spent seven years at the American Foundation for the Blind — counting needles for Talking Book phonographs, collating Talking Book records, loading trucks, typing braille letters, and transcribing incoming braille correspondence on a typewriter. One assignment stood above the rest: he designed and organized braille itineraries for Helen Keller, then raising funds for the foundation, and became well acquainted with her.^[9]

Evenings, he took mathematics courses at Brooklyn College; by 1946 he had completed the entire undergraduate curriculum. That year also brought the returning veterans — men who had passed first-semester calculus before shipping out and now faced the second semester. Nemeth volunteered to run their review. The room's walls were blackboards; each student worked a panel; Nemeth had each man read his problem aloud, then — because he had learned as a child to write print letters and symbols — he picked up chalk and helped finish the solutions himself. One Friday a telegram arrived from the department chairman: an instructor was ill for the semester; would Nemeth take the teaching load? He lectured the following Monday evening. That is how his teaching career began.^[7]

By 1951 his wife — his first wife, Florence, who was herself legally blind — convinced him that he would be "happier as an unemployed mathematician than an unemployed psychologist." She went to work so that he could begin doctoral study.^[10]

The code that carried his name

The obstacle was never aptitude; it was the notation. Standard literary braille reused the letter cells for digits — numbers were the letters a through j standing behind a number sign — so a numeral and a letter could collide, and two-dimensional mathematics (fractions, exponents, radicals, matrices) had no orderly tactile form at all. Working through evening courses, Nemeth improvised braille symbols and methods that stayed consistent from course to course — "so this was the beginning of the Nemeth Code," as he wrote in an autobiographical essay.^[11]

In 1951 a member of the Joint Uniform Braille Committee — the era's national braille standardization body — invited him to present the system. He gave his report one morning; that afternoon the committee adopted it unanimously, and it carried his name from that day forward. The code was first published in 1952; the Braille Authority of North America records its formal adoption as the official United States code in 1956, with Canada and New Zealand following. It has been revised several times since — including 1965 and 1972 revisions — and its most recent official rules update was in 2013, the year of his death.^[12]

Two design choices explain its durability:

• Digits get their own cells. Literary braille writes numbers as ⠼ followed by a–j; Nemeth drops the a–j dot patterns one row, giving digits shapes no letter can be mistaken for. A quantity can never silently become a variable.
• Spatial notation is linearized. Fractions, superscripts, radicals, and matrices open and close with explicit indicator cells, so a two-dimensional printed expression becomes one unambiguous row a finger can read straight through.

He also needed to speak mathematics — to dictate work for sighted transcription and to have readers read technical text to him without ambiguity. The conventions he built for reading formulas aloud became MathSpeak, a standard system for orally communicating mathematical text; the braille code itself mimics his spoken method — "begin exponent … return" reads like a precise verbalization of the printed page.^[13]

University of Detroit

In 1955, after a string of part-time college teaching jobs in New York, Nemeth landed a permanent post at the University of Detroit and moved his household to Michigan. He rose mathematics instructor (1955) to assistant professor (1960), associate professor (1965), and full professor (1976), retiring in 1985 after thirty years. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from Wayne State University in 1964.^[14]

He taught undergraduate and graduate courses — Fortran, assembly language, automata theory, differential equations, data structures, advanced numerical analysis — writing print symbols on the blackboard like any sighted professor, lecturing from memory. Colleagues credited him with the university's computer-science program: in the late 1960s he studied the field himself and inaugurated its graduate department.^[15]

The Soviet Union invited Nemeth and his wife to Moscow twice — in 1972 and 1976 — to present the code and to show how a blind person could use a computer screen. Closer to home he served a two-year term as chairman of the Michigan Commission for the Blind, appointed by a Republican governor though he was a registered Democrat; he said he did not like politics.^[16]

Work beyond mathematics

• Hebrew braille. Having learned Talmudic material by ear as a boy because no Hebrew braille existed, Nemeth devised the Hebrew braille system — enabling blind Jewish boys to study for their bar mitzvahs — and after retirement worked as a braille proofreader of Hebrew and Biblical texts; in 2006 he completed the English braille for a Hebrew-English siddur (prayer book).^[17]
• Music. A self-taught pianist who learned from braille music books, he compiled the Nemeth Dictionary of Braille Musical Symbols and entertained readily — a story, a limerick, or a song for nearly any occasion.^[18]
• Inventions. He built a braille slide rule and, through the National Federation of the Blind's Research and Development Committee, a talking scientific calculator for blind users — hundreds of copies distributed worldwide, with a programmable upgrade in progress late in life.^[19]
• Screen access. After retiring he worked on turning a computer with a speech synthesizer into a talking terminal for blind users.^[20]

The code's politics

Nemeth spent 1991–2001 helping develop Unified English Braille (UEB), a single international code meant to absorb mathematics — then parted ways with its designers and championed a rival system of his own, the Universal Braille System (NUBS). When BANA adopted UEB as the United States literary standard in 2012, the Nemeth Code was retained as the official notation for mathematics — the arrangement that persists: prose in UEB, mathematics in Nemeth.^[21]

Honors, and two premature obituaries

A heart attack in February 2006 briefly sidelined him; he recovered in time to attend that July's NFB convention and accept the Louis Braille Award. In March 2009 he received BANA's first-ever Braille Excellence Award, and that July the NFB named him co-recipient of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award. The American Printing House for the Blind inducted him into its Hall of Fame for Leaders and Legends of the Blindness Field.^[23]

In 1970 he had married Edna Lazar, widow of Professor Nicholas Lazar; they lived near the university so he could walk to work, later in Oak Park, Michigan. Her grandchildren grew up with "Grandpa Abe" — jokes, songs, and funny animal noises included. She died in 2000 at ninety; when he died, he was buried beside her in a Jewish cemetery in suburban Detroit.^[21]

Death

Nemeth died of congestive heart failure at his home in Southfield, Michigan, on 2 October 2013 — two weeks short of his 95th birthday. He had been working on the code that bore his name almost until the end.^[24]

References

• Yardley, William, "Abraham Nemeth, Creator of a Braille Code for Math, Is Dead at 94," The New York Times, 6 Oct 2013.
• Schudel, Matt, "Abraham Nemeth, 94, developer of Braille math code, dies," The Washington Post, 5 Oct 2013.
• "Abraham Nemeth, 94; designed Braille math and science code," The Boston Globe, 6 Oct 2013.
• "Abraham Nemeth — obituary," The Telegraph, 2014.
• "Braille World Loses a Legend," Braille Authority of North America press release, 3 Oct 2013.
• "Dr. Abraham Nemeth: The Louis Braille of Mathematics Dies at Age 94," AccessWorld, American Foundation for the Blind, Nov 2013.
• American Printing House for the Blind, Hall of Fame for Leaders and Legends of the Blindness Field: "Abraham Nemeth" profile; "Role Models: Abraham Nemeth," APH Slate, Summer 2002 (autobiographical); "Abraham Nemeth," The Coronet, July 1958.
• University of Detroit Mercy Libraries, University Honors record: "Nemeth, Abraham, Dr." (1986).
• "Alumnus cracks the code — for himself and countless others," Wayne State University, 31 Jan 2018.
• "The Beautiful Code," The Atlantic, Oct 2013.
• Associated Press, "Designer of pioneering Braille math code dies," Oct 2013.

See also

• Louis Braille — inventor of the braille cell Nemeth's work extends
• Braille · Accessibility · Mathematics
• Grace Hopper · Alonzo Church — others honored here who opened fields to the next generation