Samir Hanna Safar
Independent inventor and researcher, Solana Beach, California. Twenty-three granted U.S. utility patents since 1994 — sole inventor on every one. No co-inventors, no institution, no employer's name on any of it.
B.S. Microbiology. Everything since has been trespassing.
I trained as a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota and have spent the thirty-two years since inventing things I had no formal business inventing: a portable shade system, a fingertip shaving device, a modular snow chain, impact-proof head protection, a haptic display, a lane-level traffic sensor that talks to the car behind it. Along the way, a good deal of mathematics, a few thousand puzzles, and a number of books.
The outsider position turns out to be the useful part. I have no training in automotive engineering, and I hold a granted patent on a windshield device that fuses time-of-flight, LIDAR and radar to determine whether your own lane is stopped, then broadcasts that state as a colour to the car behind you. US 12,441,235. Someone with the right credentials would have started from what the industry already builds. I started from the observation that a navigation app can tell you the route is jammed and still cannot tell you your lane is.
What I actually do
I run the whole pipeline alone. Hypothesis, bench work, field testing in the place the thing will actually be used, patent drafting, filing with the USPTO myself for four hundred dollars, and the outreach afterward. Not because it is efficient — it is not — but because at each handoff you tend to lose the thing that made the idea worth having.
The consequence is that I have been wrong in public, in writing, more times than most people have had ideas. A year on a mathematical framework whose central ambition turned out to have no mechanism underneath it. A magnetic drive branch I closed myself with a measurement of 0.0000 mm. A referee report I commissioned against my own preprint, which found an error fatal to my headline claim, which I then corrected in the abstract of the next version.
That accumulated record of being wrong is the only genuinely scarce thing I own, and it is what this site is now about. Generating a plausible idea became free and instant in 2026. Telling a real one from a beautiful one did not, and almost nobody is teaching it.
On working with AI
Formalization, computation, and drafting are carried out with the assistance of an AI system. The questions, the direction, and every choice are mine, and I take full responsibility for them.
I disclose this in published work and in patent filings — including under oath in a sworn declaration to the USPTO, unprompted, where nobody required it of me. Partly because it is true. Mostly because a field in which nobody discloses it is a field in which nothing anyone publishes can be trusted, and I would rather not live there.
Also
I write. Sixteen books so far, including Idea to Market: From Napkin Sketch to Marketplace and The 5 Pillars of Creative Thinking, plus a long series on a structural theory of light, some fiction, and a number of children's books. I publish mathematics as open preprints with DOIs, unaffiliated. I have built ten iOS and macOS apps, and a few thousand original puzzles.
None of the patents has ever been licensed. One of them I tried to enforce myself, in federal court, against a corporation. I withdrew and settled at a loss. Those are facts about the market and about me, and they belong on this page as much as anything else does.
Get in touch
Email: shsafar@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shsafar
Patents: Justia inventor page