Alvy Ray Smith

Alvy Ray Smith
Alvy Ray Smith in 2007
Born	Alvy Ray Smith III
Nationality	American
Alma mater	New Mexico State University (B.S.E.E., 1965) Stanford University (M.S., 1966, Ph.D., 1970)
Known for	Pixar co-founder, Sunstone, Genesis Demo in The Wrath of Khan, The Adventures of Andre and Wally B., alpha channel, HSV color space, first RGB paint program
Home town	Clovis, New Mexico
Spouse(s)	Alison Gopnik (2010–present)
Website	alvyray.com

Alvy Ray Smith III is an American noted pioneer in computer graphics. He is cofounder, with Edwin Catmull, of the animation studio Pixar, financed by Steve Jobs.

In 1965, he received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University. He created his first computer graphic in 1965 at NMSU. In 1970 he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a dissertation on cellular automata theory jointly supervised by Michael A. Arbib, Edward J. McCluskey, and Bernard Widrow. His first art show was at the Stanford Coffeehouse. From 1969 to 1973 he was an associate professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at New York University, under chairman Herbert Freeman, one of the earliest computer graphics researchers. He taught briefly at the University of California at Berkeley in 1974.

While at Xerox PARC in 1974, he worked with Richard Shoup on SuperPaint, one of the very first computer paint programs. Smith's major contribution to this software was the creation of the HSV color space, also known as HSB. He created his first computer animations on the SuperPaint system.

In 1975, Smith joined the new Computer Graphics Laboratory at New York Institute of Technology, one of the leading computer graphics research groups of the 1970s. That is where he met Ed Catmull who would be his partner for many years. The group now known as Pixar began there, working alongside a traditional cel animation studio. There he worked on a series of newer paint programs, including the first 24-bit one (Paint3); as part of this work, he co-invented the concept of the alpha channel. He was also the programmer and collaborator on Ed Emshwiller's pioneering animation Sunstone, included in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He worked at NYIT until 1979, and then briefly at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Jim Blinn on the Carl Sagan Cosmos television series.