William (Bill) Paxton is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

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, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

. He is one of the founders of

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), formerly Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American software, computer software company based in San Jose, California. It offers a wide range of programs from web design tools, photo manipulation and vector creation, through to ...

and became one of the original designers and implementors of the

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language and dynamically typed, stack-based programming language. It is most commonly used in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm, but as a Turing complete programming language, it c ...

page description language. In 2021, Paxton was awarded the Beatrice M. Tinsley Prize for developing the MESA software for

computational A computation is any type of arithmetic or non-arithmetic calculation that is well-defined. Common examples of computation are mathematical equation solving and the execution of computer algorithms. Mechanical or electronic devices (or, historic ...

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, James Keeler, said, astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the ...

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" was a landmark computer demonstration, named retroactively, of developments by Stanford Research Institute's Augmentation Research Center. It was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery / Institute of Ele ...

Xerox PARC

After leaving Stanford, Paxton would join the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (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 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 dedicated to theoretical physics. KITP is one of 20 Kavli Foundation (United_States)#The Kavli Institutes, Kavli Institutes ...

(KITP) at the

, where he started working on the physics of stellar evolution. He is responsible for the EZ stellar evolution program and the creation of the open-source stellar evolution software Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics (MESA).Bill Paxton, MESA Discussion (video), October 11, 2011
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References

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