Pixar CG Pioneers Pat Hanrahan and Edwin Catmull Share $1M Turing Award

The 2019 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, was today awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, founding members of Pixar who helped shape the future of computer graphics. From a report: The two will share a $1M prize and, of course, the satisfaction of receiving this prestigious award for doing something they clearly love. The award has recently been given to such luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee, cryptographer Martin Hellman, and last year AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. Catmull was at Pixar for more than 30 years, appointed its president from the very beginning as a LucasFilm animation studio bought and repurposed by Steve Jobs. Hanrahan was an early hire, and between them the two would have had enormous effects on the world of CG, even if they hadn't built the poster child for the technology. TechCrunch spoke with Catmull and Hanrahan about the origins of the field and their early work in it that the Association for Computing Machinery chose to recognize this year. "When I started out, graphics didn't really exist," Hanrahan recalled. "I sort of discovered graphics in grad school, but there were no professors, no classes, it wasn't even in the computer sciences, really."

Rather broad award

[aeropage]

Pixar's graphics are impressive, but it doesn't have anything to do with Alan Turing or his work...

Discoveries

[JBMcB]

The award goes to people who have made significant contributions to computer technology in general. Catmull and Hanrahan did some fundamental work on 3D graphics, as in algorithms that are still widely used today. Pixar used to be a part of ILM, and did a lot of very basic computer graphics research back then.

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[aeropage]

Yes, given Nobel was known for dynamite, I suppose this one isn't outside of precedent.

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[jellomizer]

And with said Dynamite Nobel killed his brother. Yet there is a Peace prize named for him too.

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[aeropage]

Life definitely has it's ironies. :)

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[Anonymous Coward]

It also has its extra apostrophes. it's means "it is" ;)

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[DavenH]

I don't think that's fair. Nobel was a chemist, so why would there be a Nobel Prize for the other sciences? The Turing Award is the equivalent for advances in computing, and CG is at the forefront of machine learning research in many ways -- see https://www.youtube.com/user/D... [youtube.com]

Something that would be of particular interest to Turing, now that the technology has nearly bridged the uncanny valley, their work has a strong resonance with the Turing Test, in that its goal is to fool us into believing it's the

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[jellomizer]

For most of these prizes the money rarely if ever covers the expense that creates the research.
And normally the person who invents something worthy of the prize is worth more then the prize itself.

Usually the prize money will go into improving the winners fame vs fortune. Where they can use the money to get their name on college building(s), or their name on some grant.

While mainly self serving, it does help get the name out for the real doers behind the scenes. As Steve Jobs = Pixar as the popular face be

Groundbreaking work

[presearch]

Ed Catmull working out texture mapping, splines, patch surfaces, depth buffering,
and anti-aliasing, and Pat Hanrahan's inventing the concept of shaders and physically-based
rendering, all without much of a roadmap or being able to ask the net, is astounding.

Much of that trailblazing work was done on computing equipment with a testing
turnaround measured in hours, days, or weeks.

Alvy Ray Smith also deserves this level of recognition and more for inventing Alpha
channel compositing, HSV color space, and many other fundamental concepts built
into today's display systems.

Alvy pissed off Steve Jobs over a spat about a whiteboard and not putting up with
Jobs bullying, and as a result, was totally written out of Pixar's history.

He even came up with the name Pixar. What they did to him was, and still is, a disgrace.

Alvy is a rare genius, a gifted artist, a patient teacher, and a kind and gentle soul.
Working with him for the short time that I did was an honor.

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[fat man's underwear]

You think that's something, Ivan Sutherland and Doug Engelbart also did amazing stuff. In the 1960s.

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[larryjoe]

You think that's something, Ivan Sutherland and Doug Engelbart also did amazing stuff. In the 1960s.

Yes, the Turing award committees in 1988 and 1997 would agree with you.

Best use of the money?

[wingnut954]

I am saddened by the growing fad of big-money prizes awarded to people who have already achieved major success in their field. The Turing Award, Breakthrough Prize, Kavli Prize, all excuses for billionaires to give money to successful old white guys. How many undergrad scholarships could this $1M fund? Rich successful people need to stop patting themselves on the back for giving money to each other.

Not a nice guy

[Jarwulf]

Anyone who thinks Ed Catmull is a nice guy should read up on how he tried to screw over his fellow CG artists in an industrywide wagefixing scheme.