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Ivan Sutherland
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Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
erland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences.
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Encyclopedia
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers.
Biography
Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
He invented Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "As We May Think."
Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of ARPA's (now known as DARPA) Information Processing Technology Office (IPTO), when Licklider returned to MIT in 1964.
From 1965 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. With the help of his student Bob Sproull he created what is widely considered to be the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system in 1968. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the head-mounted display to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe model rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name, The Sword of Damocles.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised the Gouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.
In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages.
Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose.
On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.
Ivan's older brother, Bert Sutherland, is also a prominent computer science researcher.
Quotes
- "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarity with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."
Patents
Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:
External links
- at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Sutherland describes his tenure as head of the Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) from 1963 to 1965. He discusses the existing programs as established by J. C. R. Licklider and the new initiatives started while he was there: projects in graphics and networking, the ILLIAC IV, and the Macromodule program.
- Sutherland's Ph.D. Thesis, . His thesis supervisor was Claude Shannon, father of information theory.
- (online video and partial transcript)
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