Edwin Catmull

Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the President of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been honored for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award. Early life Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. His family later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his father first served as principal of Granite High School and then of Taylorsville High School. Early in his life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies, including Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and wanted to be an animator; however, after finishing high school, he had no idea how to get there as there were no animation schools around that time. Because he also liked math and physics, he chose a scientific career instead. He also made animation using flip-books. Catmull graduated in 1969, with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the University of Utah. Initially interested in designing programming languages, Catmull encountered Ivan Sutherland, who had designed the computer drawing program Sketchpad, and changed his interest to digital imaging. As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's DARPA program, sharing classes with James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. From that point, his main goal and ambition were to make digitally realistic films. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. Catmull says the idea for subdivision surfaces came from mathematical structures in his mind when he applied B-splines to non-four sided objects. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, which had been described eight months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis.