Ivan Sutherland

Last updated
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Sutherland at CHM.jpg
Sutherland in 2008
Born
Ivan Edward Sutherland

(1938-05-16) May 16, 1938 (age 86)
Hastings, Nebraska, U.S.
Alma mater
Known forFather of computer graphics
Direct linear transformation
Interactive computing
Sketchpad
Zooming user interface
Cohen–Sutherland algorithm
Sutherland–Hodgman algorithm
Spouse
Marly Roncken
(m. 2006)
Awards
Scientific career
Fields Computer science
Internet
Computer graphics
Institutions Harvard University
University of Utah
Evans and Sutherland
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Sun Microsystems
Portland State University
Advanced Research Projects Agency (1964–1966)
Thesis Sketchpad, a Man–Machine Graphical Communication System  (1963)
Doctoral advisor Claude Shannon [2]
Doctoral students

Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) [6] is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. [7] His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of the Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. In 2012, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces". [8] [9]

Contents

Early life and education

Sutherland's father was from New Zealand; his mother, Anne Sutherland, was from Scotland. His family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland was his elder brother. [10] Ivan Sutherland earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in electrical engineering in 1963. [11] [2]

Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. [2] Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and Steven Coons. Sketchpad was an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer.

Career and research

From 1963 to 1965, after he received his PhD, he served in the U.S. Army, commissioning as an officer through the ROTC program at Carnegie Institute of Technology. As a first lieutenant, Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964. [12] [13] [14]

From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster, Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by The Sword of Damocles, thus making the first virtual reality system. A prior system, Sensorama, [15] [16] used a head-mounted display to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly.

From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics, Henry Fuchs, and Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and now president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

In 1968 he co-founded Evans & Sutherland with his friend and colleague David C. Evans. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).

From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's computer science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased in 1990 by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. [17] [18]

Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at Sun Microsystems. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at University of California, Berkeley (fall 2005 – spring 2008). Since 2009, Sutherland and Roncken have led the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University. [19] [11]

Awards and honors

1973 "for creative contributions in computer science and computer graphics, particularly in the study of the interfaces between men and machines" [30]

Quotes

Patents

Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:

Publications

Personal life

On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. [40] He has two children.[ citation needed ] His elder brother, Bert Sutherland, was also a computer science researcher. [41]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Kay</span> American computer scientist (born 1940)

Alan Curtis Kay is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design. At Xerox PARC he led the design and development of the first modern windowed computer desktop interface. There he also led the development of the influential object-oriented programming language Smalltalk, both personally designing most of the early versions of the language and coining the term "object-oriented." He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He received the Turing award in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Brooks</span> American computer scientist (1931–2022)

Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr. was an American computer architect, software engineer, and computer scientist, best known for managing development of IBM's System/360 family of mainframe computers and the OS/360 software support package, then later writing candidly about those experiences in his seminal book The Mythical Man-Month.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Butler Lampson</span> American computer scientist

Butler W. Lampson is an American computer scientist best known for his contributions to the development and implementation of distributed personal computing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sketchpad</span> 1963 computer program written by Ivan Sutherland

Sketchpad is a computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988, and the Kyoto Prize in 2012. It pioneered human–computer interaction (HCI), and is considered the ancestor of modern computer-aided design (CAD) programs as well as a major breakthrough in the development of computer graphics in general. For example, the graphical user interface (GUI) was derived from Sketchpad as well as modern object-oriented programming. Using the program, Ivan Sutherland showed that computer graphics could be used for both artistic and technical purposes in addition to demonstrating a novel method of human–computer interaction.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edwin Catmull</span> Computer scientist and co-founder of Pixar (born 1945)

Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist and animator who served as the co-founder of Pixar and the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Kahn (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1938)

Robert Elliot Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Dongarra</span> American computer scientist (born 1950)

Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is a University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (2014–2018). Dongarra is the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2021.

Evans & Sutherland is an American computer graphics firm founded in 1968 by David Evans and Ivan Sutherland. Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums. Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins, sold products that were used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Molnar</span> American computer scientist (1935–1996)

Charles Edwin Molnar (1935–1996) was a co-developer of one of the first minicomputers, the LINC, while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962. His collaborator was Wesley A. Clark.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles P. Thacker</span> American computer scientist

Charles Patrick "Chuck" Thacker was an American pioneer computer designer. He designed the Xerox Alto, which is the first computer that used a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bob Sproull</span> American computer scientist (born c. 1945)

Robert Fletcher "Bob" Sproull is an American computer scientist, who worked for Oracle Corporation where he was director of Oracle Labs in Burlington, Massachusetts. He is currently an adjunct professor at the College of Information and Computer Sciences, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Sword of Damocles is widely misattributed as the name of the first AR display prototype. According to Ivan Sutherland, this was merely a joke name for the mechanical system that supported and tracked the actual HMD below it. It happened to look like a giant overhead cross, hence the joke. Ivan Sutherland's 1968 ground-breaking AR prototype was actually called "the head-mounted display", which is perhaps the first recorded use of the term "HMD", and he preferred "Stereoscopic-Television Apparatus for Individual Use."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pat Hanrahan</span> American computer graphics researcher

Patrick M. Hanrahan is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. His research focuses on rendering algorithms, graphics processing units, as well as scientific illustration and visualization. He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award.

James David Foley is an American computer scientist and computer graphics researcher. He is a Professor Emeritus and held the Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. He was Interim Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing from 2008–2010. He is perhaps best known as the co-author of several widely used textbooks in the field of computer graphics, of which over 400,000 copies are in print and translated in ten languages. Foley most recently conducted research in instructional technologies and distance education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Computer graphics</span> Graphics created using computers

Computer graphics deals with generating images and art with the aid of computers. Computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, digital art, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal of specialized hardware and software has been developed, with the displays of most devices being driven by computer graphics hardware. It is a vast and recently developed area of computer science. The phrase was coined in 1960 by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, or typically in the context of film as computer generated imagery (CGI). The non-artistic aspects of computer graphics are the subject of computer science research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Utah College of Engineering</span> John and Marcia Price College of Engineering in Utah, U.S.

The John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah is an academic college of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah. The college offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering and computer science.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Danny Cohen (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist

Danny Cohen was an Israeli-American computer scientist specializing in computer networking. He was involved in the ARPAnet project and helped develop various fundamental applications for the Internet. He was one of the key figures behind the separation of TCP and IP ; this allowed the later creation of UDP.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">William Newman (computer scientist)</span> British computer scientist (1939–2019)

William Maxwell Newman was a British computer scientist. With others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s Newman demonstrated the advantages of the raster display technology first deployed in the Xerox Alto personal workstation, developing interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. With Bob Sproull he co-authored the first major textbook on interactive computer graphics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">University of Utah School of Computing</span> School in University of Utah

The Kahlert School of Computing is a school within the College of Engineering at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, Utah.

References

  1. 1 2 "Ivan E. Sutherland". nasonline.org.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Ivan Sutherland at the Mathematics Genealogy Project OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg
  3. "How the Computer Graphics Industry Got Started at the University of Utah". IEEE Spectrum. 2023-06-09. Retrieved 2024-02-14.
  4. "The very beginning of the digital representation". BIM A+. 2018-12-13. Retrieved 2024-02-14.
  5. Lerner, Evan (2023-08-21). "Remembering John Warnock". The John and Marcia Price College of Engineering at the University of Utah. Retrieved 2024-02-14.
  6. Elizabeth H. Oakes (2007). Encyclopedia of World Scientists. Infobase Publishing. p. 701. ISBN   978-1-4381-1882-6 . Retrieved 16 August 2012.
  7. "Ivan E. Sutherland Display Windowing by Clipping Patent No. 3,639,736". NIHF. Archived from the original on 19 February 2016. Retrieved 13 February 2016. Sutherland is widely regarded as the "father of computer graphics."
  8. "The 2012 Kyoto Prize Laureates". Inamori Foundation. Archived from the original on 15 April 2013. Retrieved 1 January 2013.
  9. Ivan Sutherland at IMDb
  10. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine : Sutherland, Bert (February 21, 2020) [Interview took place on May 25, 2017]. "Oral History of Bert Sutherland" (Interview). Interviewed by David C. Brock and Bob Sproull. Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California: YouTube. Retrieved February 21, 2020.
  11. 1 2 CV of Ivan Sutherland, Portland State University
  12. Moschovitis Group; Hilary W. Poole; Laura Lambert; Chris Woodford; Christos J. P. Moschovitis (2005). The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN   978-1-85109-659-6.
  13. Page, Dan; Cynthia Lee (1999). "Looking Back at Start of a Revolution". UCLA Today. The Regents of the University of California (UC Regents). Archived from the original on 2007-12-24. Retrieved 2007-11-03.
  14. Waldrop, M. Mitchell (2018). The Dream Machine (Fourth ed.). Stripe Press. p. 251. ISBN   978-1-7322651-1-0.
  15. "Stereoscopic-television apparatus for individual use", Google Patents, 1957-05-24, US2955156A, retrieved 2018-05-17
  16. Brockwell, Holly (April 3, 2016). "A Gear VR for from the 1950s? - Forgotten genius: the man who made a working VR machine in 1957". TechRadar. Retrieved 2018-05-17.
  17. "Ivan Sutherland". Computer History Museum. Retrieved 2024-01-28.
  18. "VLSI Research". Oracle Labs. Retrieved 2024-01-28.
  19. "About ARC". Asynchronous Research Center. Portland State University. Archived from the original on July 20, 2011. Retrieved April 1, 2011.
  20. "Ivan E. Sutherland". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on April 3, 2015. Retrieved March 30, 2015.
  21. "Proximity Communication Garners Prestigious Awards". Sun Microsystems. Archived from the original on 2009-07-17.
  22. "IEEE John von Neumann Medal Recipients". IEEE. Archived from the original on May 9, 2009.
  23. "Ivan E Sutherland". ACM: Fellows Award. Archived from the original on Oct 21, 2012.
  24. EFF Pioneer Archived 2010-10-07 at the Wayback Machine
  25. "Software System Award". ACM Awards. Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on April 2, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2011.
  26. "IVAN E. SUTHERLAND" (PDF).
  27. "Ivan Sutherland – A.M. Turing Award Laureate". Archived from the original on 2017-09-19. Retrieved 2014-10-29.
  28. "Computerworld Leadership Award". Archived from the original on 2008-02-24. Retrieved 2010-01-23.
  29. "IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
  30. "Dr. Ivan E. Sutherland". National Academy of Engineering. Archived from the original on 2010-05-29.
  31. "US computer scientist wins Kyoto Prize". The Times of India . Jun 22, 2012. Archived from the original on 2012-06-22. Retrieved 2012-06-22.
  32. "Ivan E. Sutherland Display Windowing by Clipping Patent No. 3,639,736". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on 2016-02-19. Retrieved 2016-02-13.
  33. "Washington Award Recipients". The Washington Award. Western Society of Engineers. Archived from the original on Oct 31, 2020. Retrieved 11 September 2020.
  34. "Ivan Sutherland, Premio BBVA por revolucionar la interacción humano-máquina a través de la realidad virtual". cienciaplus (in Spanish). Europa Press. 19 February 2019. Retrieved 2019-02-19.
  35. "Ivan Sutherland, "padre de los gráficos por ordenador", Premio "Fronteras del Conocimiento" de la Fundación BBVA". 19 February 2019. Retrieved 2019-02-19. (Spanish)
  36. 1 2 Sutherland, Ivan E. (1965). "The Ultimate Display". Proceedings of IFIP Congress. pp. 506–508.
  37. Alan Kay (Speaker) (1987). Doing with Images Makes Symbols (Videotape). University Video Communications, Apple Computer. Retrieved 22 September 2011.
  38. Burton, Robert (2012). "Ivan Sutherland". A.M. Turing Awards. Archived from the original on 19 September 2017. Retrieved 2 May 2015.
  39. Sutherland, Ivan (April 1996), Technology and Courage, CiteSeerX   10.1.1.137.8273
  40. Oregonian/OregonLive, Mike Rogoway | The (2012-06-26). "Ivan Sutherland, Portland State's Kyoto Prize winner, came to Oregon for love". oregonlive. Retrieved 2024-04-02.
  41. "Ivan Sutherland - A.M. Turing Award". ACM Association for Computing Machinery.