William Paxton is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, Santa Barbara, California with 23,196 undergraduate ...

. He is one of the founders of

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...

and became one of the original designers and implementors of the

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Doug Br ...

page description language. In 2021, Paxton was awarded the

Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize The Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize is awarded every other year by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of an outstanding research contribution to astronomy or astrophysics of an exceptionally creative or innovative character. The prize is na ...

for developing the MESA software for

computational Computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that follows a well-defined model (e.g., an algorithm). Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historically, people) that perform computations are known as ''computers''. An espe ...

stellar

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...

Stanford

Paxton received his PhD from Stanford in 1977. He worked with Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute where the group would build the Online System (NLS) and was there during "

The Mother of All Demos "The Mother of All Demos" is a name retroactively applied to a landmark computer demonstration, given at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (ACM/IEEE)—Computer Society's Fall Joint Compu ...

Xerox PARC

After leaving Stanford, Paxton would join the

Xerox Palo Alto Research Center Xerox Holdings Corporation (; also known simply as Xerox) is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut (having moved from Sta ...

(PARC) where they were working on emerging technologies, including Ethernet, networked personal computers, bitmap displays, graphical user-interfaces, and laser printers.

Adobe

Paxton joined Adobe in 1983. He built the Type 1 font algorithms for PDF. Paxton and his team received the

ACM Software System Award The ACM Software System Award is an annual award that honors people or an organization "for developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both". It is awarded b ...

in 1989 for the design of the

language and implementation.

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics

In 1990 Paxton retired from Adobe Systems and became an unofficial scholar in residence at the

Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics The Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) is a research institute of the University of California, Santa Barbara. KITP is one of the most renowned institutes for theoretical physics in the world, and brings theorists in physics and rela ...

(KITP) at the

, where he started working on the physics of stellar evolution. He is responsible for the EZ stellar evolution program and has worked on the redesign of the Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA) system.Bill Paxton, MESA Discussion (video), October 11, 2011. http://online.kitp.ucsb.edu/online/asteroseismo11/paxton/

References

Living people Adobe Inc. people University of California faculty Computer scientists Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-stub