Ivan Sutherland


For the New Zealand rower, see Ivan Sutherland (rower).
Ivan Edward Sutherland

Born 1938 (1938)
Hastings, Nebraska, United States
Fields Computer science
Internet
Institutions Harvard University
University of Utah
Evans and Sutherland
California Institute of Technology
Carnegie Mellon University
Sun Microsystems
Alma mater MIT
Caltech
Carnegie Mellon
Known for Sketchpad, considered by many to be the creator of Computer Graphics
Notable awards Turing Award, IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, National Academy of Engineering member, National Academy of Sciences member

Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.

Contents

Biography

Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards.

He invented Sketchpad, 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 and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "As We May Think."

Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of ARPA's (now known as DARPA) Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), when Licklider returned to MIT in 1964.[1][2]

From 1965 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. With the help of his student Bob Sproull he created what is widely considered to be the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system in 1968. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the head-mounted display to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe model rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name, The Sword of Damocles.

Another of his Harvard students, Danny Cohen, was the first to run a visual flight simulator across the ARPANet after pioneering visual real-time interactive flight simulation on general purpose computers, and also pioneering real-time radar simulation. In 1967, Danny Cohen's flight simulation work lead to the development of the Cohen-Sutherland computer graphics three dimensional line clipping algorithm, with Ivan Sutherland. For more, read Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics, by Bob Sproull and William M. Newman (1973 and 1979).

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, Henri Gouraud who devised the Gouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.

In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and 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 by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.

Dr. Sutherland is currently a Fellow and Vice President emeritus at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). Currently, Dr. Sutherland is also leading the research in Asynchronous Systems at Portland State University and has founded Asynchronous Research Center (ARC) at Portland State University. He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose.

On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.

Ivan's elder brother, Bert Sutherland, is also a prominent computer science researcher.

Awards

Quotes

  • "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."
  • "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." (1965)
  • When asked, "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?" Ivan replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard."
  • “It’s not an idea until you write it down.”
  • "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"

Patents

Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:

References

  1. ^ Moschovitis Group, Hilary W. Poole, Laura Lambert, Chris Woodford, and Christos J. P. Moschovitis (2005). The Internet: A Historical Encyclopedia. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1851096590. http://books.google.com/books?id=qi-ItIG6QLwC&pg=RA1-PA159&dq=licklider+sutherland+arpa&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=Do8_SMj3LqDKjgGl3dSIBQ&sig=D24UEt_Fv5XZuuIvOEk1JGvdK14. 
  2. ^ Page, Dan and Cynthia Lee (1999). "Looking Back at Start of a Revolution". UCLA Today (The Regents of the University of California (UC Regents)). http://www.today.ucla.edu/1999/990928looking.html. Retrieved 2007-11-03. 
  3. ^ http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/index.php?id=46 Computer History Museum Fellow
  4. ^ http://research.sun.com/spotlight/2004-09-20.proximity.html R&D 100
  5. ^ http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/pr/vonneupr.html von Neumann Medal
  6. ^ http://fellows.acm.org/fellow_citation.cfm?id=3467412&srt=alpha&alpha=S ACM Fellow
  7. ^ http://w2.eff.org/awards/pioneer/1994.php EFF Pioneer
  8. ^ http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=8840562&srt=alpha&alpha=S&aw=140&ao=AMTURING&yr=1988 Turing Award
  9. ^ http://www.cwhonors.org/leadership/indexpast.html Computerworld Leadership Award
  10. ^ http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/about/awards/pr/piorepr.html Piore Award
  11. ^ http://www.nasonline.org/site/Dir/244534946?pg=vprof&mbr=1006266&returl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nasonline.org%2Fsite%2FDir%2F244534946%3Fpg%3Dsrch%26view%3Dbasic&retmk=search_again_link NAS Member
  12. ^ http://www.nae.edu/nae/naepub.nsf/Members+By+UNID/A96504917AE99F038625755200622DC5?opendocument NAE member

Publications and External links

v • d • e
A. M. Turing Award laureates

Alan Perlis (1966) · Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1967) · Richard Hamming (1968) · Marvin Minsky (1969) · James H. Wilkinson (1970) · John McCarthy (1971) · Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972) · Charles Bachman (1973) · Donald Knuth (1974) · Allen Newell / Herbert Simon (1975) · Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976) · John Backus (1977) · Robert Floyd (1978) · Kenneth E. Iverson (1979) · C. A. R. Hoare (1980) · Edgar F. Codd (1981) · Stephen Cook (1982) · Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie (1983) · Niklaus Wirth (1984) · Richard Karp (1985) · John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986) · John Cocke (1987) · Ivan Sutherland (1988) · William Kahan (1989) · Fernando J. Corbató (1990) · Robin Milner (1991) · Butler Lampson (1992) · Juris Hartmanis / Richard Stearns (1993) · Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994) · Manuel Blum (1995) · Amir Pnueli (1996) · Douglas Engelbart (1997) · Jim Gray (1998) · Fred Brooks (1999) · Andrew Yao (2000) · Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001) · Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir / Leonard Adleman (2002) · Alan Kay (2003) · Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004) · Peter Naur (2005) · Frances E. Allen (2006) · Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007) · Barbara Liskov (2008)






stock | retire | vm
Why are we here?
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
This page is cache of Wikipedia. History