Edwin Earl "Ed" Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American
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 ...
who is the co-founder of
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...
and was the President of
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS), sometimes shortened to Disney Animation, is an American animation studio that creates animated features and short films for The Walt Disney Company. The studio's current production logo features a scene fro ...
.
He has been honored for his contributions to 3D
computer graphics
Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great de ...
, including the 2019
ACM Turing Award.
Early life
Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in
Parkersburg, West Virginia
Parkersburg is a city in and the county seat of Wood County, West Virginia, Wood County, West Virginia. Located at the confluence of the Ohio River, Ohio and Little Kanawha River, Little Kanawha rivers, it is the state's fourth-largest city and ...
.
His family later moved to
Salt Lake City
Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the Capital (political), capital and List of cities and towns in Utah, most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the county seat, seat of Salt Lake County, Utah, Sal ...
,
Utah
Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...
, where his father first served as principal of
Granite High School and then of
Taylorsville High School
Taylorsville High School is a public high school established in 1981, located in Taylorsville, Utah, United States. The principal is Mrs. Emily Liddell. The mascot is the Wilbur the Warrior. The current enrollment is around 2,900 students and ...
.
Early in his life, Catmull found inspiration in
Disney
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
movies, including ''
Peter Pan
Peter Pan is a fictional character created by List of Scottish novelists, Scottish novelist and playwright J. M. Barrie. A free-spirited and mischievous young boy who can fly and Puer aeternus, never grows up, Peter Pan spends his never-ending ...
'' and ''
Pinocchio
Pinocchio ( , ) is a fictional character and the protagonist of the children's novel ''The Adventures of Pinocchio'' (1883) by Italian writer Carlo Collodi of Florence, Tuscany. Pinocchio was carved by a woodcarver named Geppetto in a Tuscan vil ...
'', and wanted to be an animator; however, after finishing high school, he had no idea how to get there as there were no animation schools around that time. Because he also liked math and physics, he chose a scientific career instead. He also made animation using
flip-books. Catmull graduated in 1969, with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the
University of Utah
The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of De ...
.
Initially interested in designing
programming languages
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
, Catmull encountered
Ivan Sutherland
Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His early work in computer graphics as well as his teaching with David C. Evans in that subje ...
, who had designed the computer drawing program
Sketchpad
Sketchpad (a.k.a. Robot Draftsman) is a computer program written by Ivan Sutherland in 1963 in the course of his PhD thesis, for which he received the Turing Award in 1988, and the Kyoto Prize in 2012. It pioneered human–computer interaction ( ...
, and changed his interest to
digital imaging
Digital imaging or digital image acquisition is the creation of a digital representation of the visual characteristics of an object, such as a physical scene or the interior structure of an object. The term is often assumed to imply or include ...
. As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's
ARPA program, sharing classes with
James H. Clark
James Henry Clark (born March 23, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and computer scientist. He founded several notable Silicon Valley technology companies, including Silicon Graphics, Netscape, myCFO, and Healtheon. His research work in comput ...
,
John Warnock
John Edward Warnock (born October 6, 1940) is an American computer scientist and businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke. Warnock was President of Adobe for ...
and
Alan Kay
Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) published by the Association for Computing Machinery 2012 is an American computer scientist best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) d ...
.
From that point, his main goal and ambition were to make digitally realistic films. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries:
texture mapping
Texture mapping is a method for mapping a texture on a computer-generated graphic. Texture here can be high frequency detail, surface texture, or color.
History
The original technique was pioneered by Edwin Catmull in 1974.
Texture mapping ...
and
bicubic patches
In mathematics, bicubic interpolation is an extension of cubic interpolation (not to be confused with cubic spline interpolation, a method of applying cubic interpolation to a data set) for interpolating data points on a two-dimensional regular ...
; and invented
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specificat ...
s for
spatial anti-aliasing
In digital signal processing, spatial anti-aliasing is a technique for minimizing the distortion artifacts (aliasing) when representing a high-resolution image at a lower resolution. Anti-aliasing is used in digital photography, computer graphics ...
and refining
subdivision surface
In the field of 3D computer graphics, a subdivision surface (commonly shortened to SubD surface) is a curved surface represented by the specification of a coarser polygon mesh and produced by a recursive algorithmic method. The curved surface, t ...
s. Catmull says the idea for subdivision surfaces came from mathematical structures in his mind when he applied
B-spline
In the mathematical subfield of numerical analysis, a B-spline or basis spline is a spline function that has minimal support with respect to a given degree, smoothness, and domain partition. Any spline function of given degree can be expresse ...
s to non-four sided objects. He also independently discovered
Z-buffering
A depth buffer, also known as a z-buffer, is a type of data buffer used in computer graphics to represent depth information of objects in 3D space from a particular perspective. Depth buffers are an aid to rendering a scene to ensure that the ...
, which had been described eight months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis.
In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: a one-minute animated version of his left hand, titled ''
A Computer Animated Hand
''A Computer Animated Hand'' is the title of a 1972 American computer-animated short film produced by Edwin Catmull and Fred Parke. Produced during Catmull's tenure at the University of Utah, the short was created for a graduate course project. A ...
'', created with
Fred Parke
Frederic Ira Parke is an American computer graphics researcher and academic. He did early work on animated computer renderings of human faces.
Parke graduated from the University of Utah with a BS degree in physics in 1965. He was then a gradua ...
at the University of Utah. This short sequence was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 film ''
Futureworld
''Futureworld'' is a 1976 American science fiction thriller film directed by Richard T. Heffron and written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck. It is a sequel to the 1973 Michael Crichton film ''Westworld'', and is the second installment in the ...
'',
which was the first film to use
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics, or “3D graphics,” sometimes called CGI, 3D-CGI or three-dimensional computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data (often Cartesian) that is stored in the computer for th ...
and a science-fiction sequel to the 1973 film ''
Westworld
''Westworld'' is an American science fiction- thriller media franchise that began with the 1973 film ''Westworld'', written and directed by Michael Crichton. The film depicts a technologically advanced Wild-West-themed amusement park populat ...
'', itself being the first to use a
pixelated
Pixelization (British English, pixelisation) or mosaic processing is any technique used in editing images or video, whereby an image is blurred by displaying part or all of it at a markedly lower resolution. It is primarily used for censorship ...
image generated by a computer. ''A Computer Animated Hand'' was selected for preservation in the
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation, each selected for its historical, cultural and aesthetic contributions since the NFPB’s inception i ...
of the
Library of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is ...
in December 2011.
Career
Early career
In 1974, Catmull earned his doctorate 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 ...
,
and was hired by a company called
Applicon
Applicon, Incorporated was one of the first manufacturers of Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems. It was co-founded in 1969 in Bedford, Massachusetts by four founders working at the MIT Lincoln Lab: Fontaine Richardson who e ...
. By November of that year, he had been contacted by
Alexander Schure
Alexander Schure (August 3, 1920 – October 29, 2009) was an American academic and entrepreneur. Schure founded the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in 1955. He also served as the Chancellor (education), Chancellor of Nova Southeastern Uni ...
, the founder of the
New York Institute of Technology
The New York Institute of Technology (NYIT or New York Tech) is a private research university founded in 1955. It has two main campuses in New York—one in Old Westbury, on Long Island, and one in Manhattan. Additionally, it has a cybersecu ...
, who offered him the position as the director of the institute's new
Computer Graphics Lab
The Computer Graphics Lab was a computer lab located at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in the late 1970s and 1980s, founded by Dr. Alexander Schure. It was originally located at the "pink building" on the NYIT campus.
The lab was ini ...
. In that position, in 1977, he invented Tween, software for 2D animation that automatically produced frames of motion in between two frames.
However, Catmull's team lacked the ability to tell a story effectively via film, harming the effort to produce a motion picture via a computer. Catmull and his partner,
Alvy Ray Smith
Alvy Ray Smith III (born September 8, 1943) is an American computer scientist who co-founded Lucasfilm's Computer Division and Pixar, participating in the 1980s and 1990s expansion of computer animation into feature film.
Education
In 1965, A ...
, attempted to reach out to studios to alleviate this issue, but were generally unsuccessful until they attracted the attention of
George Lucas
George Walton Lucas Jr. (born May 14, 1944) is an American filmmaker. Lucas is best known for creating the ''Star Wars'' and ''Indiana Jones'' franchises and founding Lucasfilm, LucasArts, Industrial Light & Magic and THX. He served as chairm ...
at
Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC is an American film and television production company and a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, which is a business segment of The Walt Disney Company. The studio is best known for creating and producing the ''Star Wars'' and ' ...
.
Lucasfilm
Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to lead a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital audio into the entertainment field.
Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called
Triple-I
Information International, Inc., commonly referred to as Triple-I or III, was an early computer technology company.
Background
The company was founded by Edward Fredkin in 1962 in Maynard, Massachusetts. It then moved (serially) to Santa Monica ...
, and asked them to create a digital model of an
X-wing fighter
The X-wing starfighter is a name applied to a family of fictional spacecraft manufactured by the Incom Corporation from the ''Star Wars'' franchise. Named for the distinctive shape made when its s-foils (wings) are in attack position, the X-win ...
from ''
Star Wars
''Star Wars'' is an American epic film, epic space opera multimedia franchise created by George Lucas, which began with the Star Wars (film), eponymous 1977 film and quickly became a worldwide popular culture, pop-culture Cultural impact of S ...
'', which they did. In 1979, Catmull became the Vice President at
Industrial Light & Magic
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects company that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began pro ...
computer graphics division at Lucasfilm.
Pixar
In 1986,
Steve Jobs
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, media proprietor, and investor. He was the co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple; the chairman and majority shareholder of Pixar; a ...
bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, Californi ...
, where Catmull would work. Pixar would be acquired by Disney in 2006.
In June 2007, Catmull and long-time Pixar digital animator and director
John Lasseter
John Alan Lasseter (; born January 12, 1957) is an American film director, producer, screenwriter, animator, voice actor, and the head of animation at Skydance Animation. He was previously the chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, ...
were given control of
Disneytoon Studios, a division of
Disney Animation
The Walt Disney Company, commonly known as Disney (), is an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate headquartered at the Walt Disney Studios complex in Burbank, California. Disney was originally founded on October ...
housed in a separate facility in Glendale. As president and chief creative officer, respectively, they have supervised three separate studios for Disney, each with its own production pipeline: Pixar, Disney Animation, and Disneytoon. While Disney Animation and Disneytoon are located in the Los Angeles area, Pixar is located over 350 miles (563 kilometers) northwest in the
San Francisco Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Go ...
, where Catmull and Lasseter both live. Accordingly, they appointed a general manager for each studio to handle day-to-day affairs on their behalf, then began regularly commuting each week to both Pixar and Disney Animation and spending at least two days per week (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays) at Disney Animation.
While at Pixar, Catmull was implicated in the
High-Tech Employee Antitrust scandal, in which Bay Area technology companies allegedly agreed, among other things, not to cold-call recruit from one another.
Catmull defended his actions in a
deposition, saying: "While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also."
Disney and its subsidiaries, including Pixar, ultimately paid $100 million in settlement compensation.
In November 2014, the general managers of Disney Animation and Pixar were both promoted to president, but both continued to report to Catmull, who retained the title of president of Walt Disney and Pixar.
On October 23, 2018, Catmull announced his plans to retire from Pixar and Disney Animation, staying on as an adviser through July 2019.
Personal life
As of 2006, Catmull lived in
Marin County, California
Marin County is a County (United States), county located in the northwestern part of the San Francisco Bay Area of the U.S. state of California. As of the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census, the population was 262,231. Its county seat and ...
, with his wife Susan and their three children.
Catmull has an inability to form
mental imagery
A mental image is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of 'perceiving' some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are ...
within his head, a condition known as
aphantasia
Aphantasia ( , ) is the inability to create mental imagery.
The phenomenon was first described by Francis Galton in 1880 but has since remained relatively unstudied. Interest in the phenomenon renewed after the publication of a study in 2015 c ...
.
Awards and honors
In 1993, Catmull received his first
Academy Scientific and Technical Award
The Scientific and Technical Awards are three different Honorary Awards that are given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) during the annual Academy Awards season. The Awards have been presented since the 4th Academy Awards ...
from the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS, often pronounced ; also known as simply the Academy or the Motion Picture Academy) is a professional honorary organization with the stated goal of advancing the arts and sciences of motio ...
"for the development of
PhotoRealistic RenderMan
Pixar RenderMan (formerly PhotoRealistic RenderMan) is proprietary photorealistic 3D rendering software produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar uses RenderMan to render their in-house 3D animated movie productions and it is also available as ...
software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance". He shared this award with
Tom Porter. In 1995, he was inducted as a Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...
. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing".
In 2000, Catmull was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...
for leadership in the creation of digital imagery, leading to the introduction of fully synthetic visual effects and motion pictures.
In 2001, he received an Oscar "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan". In 2006, he was awarded the
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
The IEEE John von Neumann Medal was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or ...
for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation and rendering. At the
81st Academy Awards
The 81st Academy Awards ceremony, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), honored the best films of 2008 and took place on February 22, 2009, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Los Angeles beginning at 5:30  ...
(2008, presented in February 2009), Catmull was awarded the
Gordon E. Sawyer Award
The Gordon E. Sawyer Award is an Honorary Award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry." The award is named in ...
, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry".
In 2013, the
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on ...
named him a Museum Fellow "for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking".
His book ''
Creativity, Inc.
''Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration'' is a 2014 book, written by Edwin Catmull and Amy Wallace, about managing creativity in business.
As a co-founder of Pixar, Catmull discusses the environme ...
'' was shortlisted for the
(2014), and was a selection for
Mark Zuckerberg book club Mark Zuckerberg book club (aka A Year of Books) was an online book club hosted by Mark Zuckerberg through his personal Facebook account started in January 2015. Zuckerberg made a book recommendation every two weeks for a year to his millions of Fac ...
in March 2015.
Catmull shared the 2019
Turing Award
The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in compu ...
with
Pat Hanrahan
Patrick M. Hanrahan (born 1954) is an American computer graphics researcher, the Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University.
His research focuses on rendering algo ...
for their pioneering work on computer-generated imagery.
Filmography
Bibliography
*
*Catmull, Ed (2016). "Part 2: Wealthy § Ed Catmull." Pp. 309–13 in
''Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers'', edited by
Tim Ferriss
Timothy Ferriss (born July 20, 1977) is an American entrepreneur, investor, author, podcaster, and lifestyle guru. He became well-known through his ''4-Hour'' self-help book series—including ''The 4-Hour Work Week'', ''The 4-Hour Body'', and '' ...
.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (; HMH) is an American publisher of textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers and adults. The company is based in the Financial Dist ...
. ISBN 9781328683786.
References
External links
*
Catmull discusses creativity, entrepreneurship, story telling and filmmaking Stanford University, 2014-04-30 (video with transcript)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Catmull, Edwin
1945 births
20th-century Mormon missionaries
Academy Award for Technical Achievement winners
American computer scientists
American Mormon missionaries in the United States
Computer graphics professionals
Computer graphics researchers
Disney executives
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Latter Day Saints from West Virginia
Living people
Lucasfilm people
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
New York Institute of Technology faculty
People from Parkersburg, West Virginia
Pixar people
Pixar
Recipients of the Scientific and Technical Academy Award of Merit
Recipients of the Gordon E. Sawyer Award
University of Utah alumni
Walt Disney Animation Studios people
Turing Award laureates
Industrial Light & Magic people