Edwin Catmull
| Edwin Catmull | |
|---|---|
Catmull in 2010
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| Born | Edwin Earl Catmull March 31, 1945 Parkersburg, West Virginia |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions |
Pixar Lucasfilm DisneyToon Studios Walt Disney Animation Studios |
| Alma mater | University of Utah (Ph.D. Computer Science; B.S. Physics and Computer Science) |
| Thesis | A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces (1974) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert E. Stephenson |
| Known for |
Texture mapping Catmull–Rom spline Catmull–Clark subdivision surface |
| Notable awards |
Academy Award (1993) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2006) Computer History Museum Fellow (2013) |
| Spouse | Susan Anderson Catmull |
Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is a computer scientist and current president of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Animation Studios (including the latter's DisneyToon Studios division). As a computer scientist, Catmull has contributed to many important developments in computer graphics.
Edwin Catmull was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia. His family later moved to Utah, where Catmull's father first served as principal of Granite High School, then Taylorsville High School. Raised in a Mormon family, Catmull was the oldest of five and as a young man served as a missionary to the New York City area in the 1960s. Early in life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies such as Peter Pan and Pinocchio and dreamed of becoming a feature film animator. He even made primitive animation using so-called flip-books. However, he assessed his chances realistically and decided that his talents lay elsewhere. Instead of pursuing a career in the movie industry, he used his talent in math and studied physics and computer science at the University of Utah. After graduating, he worked as a computer programmer at The Boeing Company in Seattle for a short period of time and also at the New York Institute of Technology, before returning to Utah to go to graduate school in fall of 1970.
Back at the university, he became one of Ivan Sutherland's students and part of the university's ARPA program, sharing classes with Fred Parke, James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. Catmull saw Sutherland's computer drawing program Sketchpad and the new field of computer graphics in general as a major fundament in the future of animation, combining his love for both technology and animation, and decided to be a part of the revolution from the beginning. From that point, his main goal and ambition was to make a computer-animated movie. During his time there, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping, and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, even though it had already been described 8 months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis. In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: an animated version of his left hand which was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 movie Futureworld, the science-fiction sequel to the film Westworld and the first film to use 3D computer graphics. The sequence, known simply as A Computer Animated Hand, was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.
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