Pat Hanrahan is a friend and colleague at Stanford. For years, he occupied the office next door in the Gates Building. He's smart and insightful, gracious, thoughtful, well spoken, and open--social virtues which amplify intellectual skills. While the Turing Award cites his work in computer graphics, he has made significant contributions is other areas.
Nice to see computer graphics pioneers being recognized. Reading Ed Catmull's name always brings fond memories of learning mesh processing techniques they first thought of, like the Catmull-Clark subdivision (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivision_surface" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivis...</a>). Elegant stuff.
Pat Hanrahan and I were CS grad students at the University of Wisconsin Madison at the same time. In addition to being brilliant, Pat was kind, egoless, and infectiously happy. He was just a fun person to be around. I haven't seen Pat since grad school days, but I'm sure it's as true now as it was then!<p>Amusing side note: Brian Paul, who wrote the mesa open source implementation of OpenGL, was a Wisconsin grad student at the same time! He was in the meteorology department, in the building across the street from computer science.
> In the early 1970s, Dr. Catmull was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah under one of the founding fathers of computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland.<p>Off topic - I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with Ivan Sutherland, also a Turing award winner [0]. Ivan was one of the most "fun" scientists I have met and spoken with. His conversations were full with humor and humility.<p>I was walking past the street where Ivan (he insisted to call me that) was having a coffee. He asked me if I'd like to join him for one - pleasantly surprised, I said yes. The next 45m was Ivan telling me about a research problem he was working on and asking "tips" on how I would solve it. Initially, I was hesitant but he insisted and took me along a journey inside his wonderful mind.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland</a>
Back when I was a wee young graphics programmer I taught myself to use Catmull-Rom splines to interpolate between camera positions (among many other things) for some stuff I was doing. Great to see one of the inventors getting recognition of all the cool stuff he's done!
I kind of wish ACM had mentioned the names of Pat Hanrahan's grad student(s) who worked on Brook, the predecessor of Nvidia's CUDA.<p>Though they did mention Marc Levoy, his Stanford colleague and coauthor on the light field paper.
Pat Hanrahan is a wonderful soul. I talked to him after a talk he gave and he was super nice and not judgmental.<p>I don't have the same opinion about Ed Catmull. His wage fixing really saddened me. To remove agency from peoples lives for profit of Pixar is an unconscionable act. He curtailed lives for his own gain.
Having worked at Pixar, I think Catmull's wage-fixing involvement should absolutely disqualify him from receiving the Turing Award.<p>And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing. Z-buffering is obvious. Those were the days of low hanging fruit in graphics.
I had the good fortune of taking Hanrahan's introductory computer graphics class at Stanford several years ago.<p>He's a great teacher and the class was a lot of fun. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy as well. Congratulations!
Has Catmull changed his opinion on his participation in illegally colluding with Google, Apple, etc to keep employee wages low? <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-google-no-poaching-evidence-triggers-more-lawsuits" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-goo...</a>
Can we link to the ACM award site and its article instead of the NYT paywall?<p><a href="https://amturing.acm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://amturing.acm.org/</a>
Catmull reminds me of Fritz Haber [1] in that he both invented amazingly useful tech. while being an absolutely horrible human being.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber</a>