Ivan Sutherland (born 1938) is an American computer scientist widely regarded as a pioneer of interactive computer graphics. [1] His 1963 doctoral program Sketchpad demonstrated that people could work with computers graphically and helped lay the groundwork for computer-aided design and modern user interfaces. [3] In 1988 he received the A. M. Turing Award, computing's highest honor. [4]
Early life and education
Ivan Edward Sutherland was born on 16 May 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska. [1] He earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), a master's degree from the California Institute of Technology, and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, where his adviser was the information theorist Claude Shannon. [1]
Sketchpad
For his doctoral thesis Sutherland created Sketchpad, a program that let a user draw and manipulate figures directly on a display screen with a light pen. [3] Running on MIT Lincoln Laboratory's TX-2 computer, it introduced ideas such as graphical objects governed by geometric constraints and reusable master drawings, anticipating later object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces, and computer-aided design. [3] The work is widely credited as a foundational moment in interactive computer graphics. [2]
Career
In 1964 Sutherland succeeded J. C. R. Licklider as director of the Information Processing Techniques Office at the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), overseeing early government funding of computing research. [1] He later taught at Harvard University and the University of Utah, where his students included figures who would shape the graphics and personal-computing industries, among them Alan Kay, Edwin Catmull, and John Warnock. [1] In 1968 he co-founded Evans & Sutherland with David C. Evans to build advanced graphics hardware. [1]
Virtual reality and later work
While at Harvard, Sutherland and his student Bob Sproull built one of the first head-mounted displays, a see-through system nicknamed the Sword of Damocles that updated a wireframe scene as the wearer moved the head, an early step toward virtual and augmented reality. [1] He subsequently joined the California Institute of Technology, where he helped establish the teaching of computer science and worked on integrated-circuit design, and he later became a fellow at Sun Microsystems. [1]
Legacy
Sutherland received the Association for Computing Machinery's A. M. Turing Award in 1988 for Sketchpad and his contributions to computer graphics. [4] His other honors include the IEEE John von Neumann Medal and the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology, and he is a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame. [1] He is frequently described as a founder of the field of computer graphics. [2]
