Ivan Sutherland

Ivan wrote SketchPad which introduced a half dozen or more wonderful concepts to the field of interactive computer graphics. AlanKay once asked Ivan how he had been able to solve so many hard problems so early. Ivan replied that he just didn't know that they were supposed to be hard.

He was later involved in very early VirtualReality and 3D modeling work at the UniversityOfUtah and elsewhere.

He received the ACM TuringAward in 1988:

: For his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after. Sketchpad, though written twenty-five years ago, introduced many techniques still important today. These include a display file for screen refresh, a recursively traversed hierarchical structure for modeling graphical objects, recursive methods for geometric transformations, and an object oriented programming style. Later innovations include a "Lorgnette" for viewing stereo or colored images, and elegant algorithms for registering digitized views, clipping polygons, and representing surfaces with hidden lines.

Sutherland seems to be dyslexic: he admits to difficulty with spelling, and didn't learn to read until the third grade. He says that this led to his interest in computer graphics: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1712558627021572786#9m45s

Sutherland talks about his life and research: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1712558627021572786

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