Alan W. Paeth (11 May 1956 - 3 June 2018) was a Canadian computer scientist and author.

Life and education

Alan William Paeth was born on May 11, 1956 in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

. He obtained a Bachelor's degree in

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from

Caltech The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

and his PhD at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

in 1994. His doctoral advisor was William B. Cowan and his doctoral dissertation was on ''Linear Models of Reflective Colour''. He married Catherine Anne Person in 1983; she predeceased him in 2008. He died in

Kelowna, British Columbia Kelowna ( ) is a city on Okanagan Lake in the Okanagan Valley in the southern interior of British Columbia, Canada. It serves as the head office of the Regional District of Central Okanagan. The name Kelowna derives from the Okanagan word ''ki� ...

on June 3, 2018.

Career

He was professor of computer science at Okanagan University in British Columbia. He made major research contributions to computer graphics and has made seminal contributions in the field of

Portable Network Graphics Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange F ...

including

Shear mapping In plane geometry, a shear mapping is a linear map that displaces each point in a fixed direction, by an amount proportional to its signed distance from the line that is parallel to that direction and goes through the origin. This type of mappi ...

Selected publications

His notable books include: * ''Graphics Gems V'' * ''Algorithms for fast color correction'' * ''The IM raster toolkit : design, implementation and use'' * ''Linear models of reflective colour ''

References

External links

Alan PaethUniversity of WaterlooUniversity of Waterloo
1956 births 2018 deaths Canadian computer scientists University of Waterloo alumni California Institute of Technology alumni People from Seattle {{Canada-compu-bio-stub