Ivan Edward Sutherland (born May 16, 1938) 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 ...

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 David Cannon Evans (February 24, 1924 – October 3, 1998) was the founder of the computer science department at the University of Utah and co-founder (with Ivan Sutherland) of Evans & Sutherland, a pioneering firm in computer graphics hardwar ...

in that subject at the University of Utah in the 1970s was pioneering in the field. Sutherland, Evans, and their students from that era developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from 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 ...

in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

among many other major awards. In 2012 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for "pioneering achievements in the development of computer graphics and interactive interfaces".

Biography

Sutherland's father was from New Zealand; his mother was from Scotland. His family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland was his elder brother. Ivan Sutherland earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, his master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963. Sutherland invented Sketchpad in 1962 while at MIT. Claude Shannon signed on to supervise Sutherland's computer drawing thesis. Among others on his thesis committee were Marvin Minsky and

Steven Coons Steven Anson Coons (March 7, 1912 – August 1979) was an early pioneer in the field of computer graphical methods. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was also a professor ...

. Sketchpad was 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 Douglas Carl Engelbart (January 30, 1925 – July 2, 2013) was an American engineer and inventor, and an early computer and Internet pioneer. He is best known for his work on founding the field of human–computer interaction, particularly ...

's oN-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his influential paper "

As We May Think "As We May Think" is a 1945 essay by Vannevar Bush which has been described as visionary and influential, anticipating many aspects of information society. It was first published in ''The Atlantic'' in July 1945 and republished in an abridged v ...

". Sutherland replaced J. C. R. Licklider as the head of the US Defense Department Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), when Licklider took a job at IBM in 1964. From 1965 to 1968, Sutherland was an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University. Work with student Danny Cohen in 1967 led to the development of the Cohen–Sutherland computer graphics line clipping algorithm. In 1968, with his students Bob Sproull, Quintin Foster, Danny Cohen, and others he created the first head-mounted display that rendered images for the viewer's changing pose, as sensed by

The Sword of Damocles Damocles is a character who appears in an (likely apocryphal) anecdote commonly referred to as "the sword of Damocles", an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power. Damocles was a courtier in the co ...

, thus making the first virtual reality system. A prior system, Sensorama, used a head-mounted display to play back static video and other sensory stimuli. The optical see-through head-mounted display used in Sutherland's VR system was a stock item used by U.S. military helicopter pilots to view video from cameras mounted on the helicopter's belly. From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the

Smalltalk Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed reflective programming language. It was designed and created in part for educational use, specifically for constructionist learning, at the Learning Research Group (LRG) of Xerox PARC by Alan Ka ...

language, Gordon W. Romney (computer and cybersecurity scientist), who rendered the first 3D images at U of U, Henri Gouraud, who devised the Gouraud shading technique, Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics,

Henry Fuchs Henry Fuchs (born 20 January 1948 in Tokaj, Hungary) is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Federico Gil Professor of Computer Science at the University of Nor ...

, and Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar and now president of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. In 1968 he co-founded Evans & Sutherland with his friend and colleague

. The company did pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated

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 printer languages. Former employees of Evans & Sutherland included the future founders of

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...

( John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (

Jim Clark James Clark Jr. OBE (4 March 1936 – 7 April 1968) was a British Formula One racing driver from Scotland, who won two World Championships, in 1963 and 1965. A versatile driver, he competed in sports cars, touring cars and in the Indianapol ...

). 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 Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs. Sutherland was a fellow and vice president at

. Sutherland was a visiting scholar in the computer science division at University of California, Berkeley (fall 2005 – spring 2008). On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken. Sutherland and Marly Roncken are leading the research in

Asynchronous Systems The primary focus of this article is asynchronous control in digital electronic systems. In a synchronous system, operations (instructions, calculations, logic, etc.) are coordinated by one, or more, centralized clock signals. An asynchronou ...

at Portland State University. He has two children. His elder brother, Bert Sutherland, was also a computer science researcher.

Awards

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 ...

Fellow "for the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education," 2005 * R&D 100 Award, 2004 (team)R&D 100
* IEEE John von Neumann Medal, 1998von Neumann Medal
/ref> *

Fellow, 1994ACM Fellow
/ref> *

Electronic Frontier Foundation The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is an international non-profit digital rights group based in San Francisco, California. The foundation was formed on 10 July 1990 by John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow and Mitch Kapor to promote Internet ci ...

EFF Pioneer Award, 1994EFF Pioneer
* ACM Software System Award, 1993 * Turing Award, 1988 *

Computerworld ''Computerworld'' (abbreviated as CW) is an ongoing decades old professional publication which in 2014 "went digital." Its audience is information technology (IT) and business technology professionals, and is available via a publication website ...

Honors Program, Leadership Award, 1987 * * Member, United States National Academy of Sciences, 1978NAS Member
/ref> * National Academy of Engineering member 1973 "for creative contributions in computer science and computer graphics, particularly in the study of the interfaces between men and machines"NAE member
* Kyoto Prize 2012, in the category of advanced technology. * National Inventors Hall of Fame Inductee, 2016. * Washington Award, 2018 * BBVA Fronteras del conocimiento 2019.

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." * "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." * When asked: "How could you possibly have done the first interactive graphics program, the first non-procedural programming language, the first object oriented software system, all in one year?", Sutherland replied: "Well, I didn't know it was hard." * "It’s not an idea until you write it down." * "Without the fun, none of us would go on!"

Patents

Sutherland has more than 60 patents, including:
US Patent 7,636,361 (2009) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication with flow control

US Patent 7,417,993 (2008) Apparatus and method for high-throughput asynchronous communication

US Patent 7,384,804 (2008) Method and apparatus for electronically aligning capacitively coupled mini-bars

US patent 3,889,107 (1975) System of polygon sorting by dissection

US patent 3,816,726 (1974) Computer Graphics Clipping System for Polygons

US patent 3,732,557 (1973) Incremental Position-Indicating System

US patent 3,684,876 (1972) Vector Computing System as for use in a Matrix Computer

US patent 3,639,736 (1972) Display Windowing by Clipping

Publications

2004 from "CAD software – history of CAD CAM" by CADAZZ *Sutherland's 1963 Ph.D. Thesis from Massachusetts Institute of Technology republished in 2003 by University of Cambridge as Technical Report Number 574,
Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System
'. His thesis supervisor was Claude Shannon, father of

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...

.
Duchess Chips for Process-Specific Wire Capacitance Characterization, The
by Jon Lexau, Jonathan Gainsley, Ann Coulthard and Ivan E. Sutherland,

Sun Microsystems Laboratories Oracle Labs (formerly Sun Microsystems Laboratories, or Sun Labs) is a research and development branch of Oracle Corporation. The labs were created when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun Labs was established in 1990 by Ivan Sutherland and R ...

Report Number TR-2001-100, October 2001
Technology And Courage
by Ivan Sutherland,

Perspectives Essay Series, Perspectives-96-1 (April 1996) *
Counterflow Pipeline Processor Architecture
by Ivan E. Sutherland, Charles E. Molnar ( Charles Molnar), and Robert F. Sproull ( Bob Sproull),

Report Number TR-94-25, April 1994
Oral history interview with Ivan Sutherland
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.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Sutherland, Ivan American computer scientists American software engineers 1938 births Living people Computer graphics professionals Computer graphics researchers Internet pioneers Virtual reality pioneers Engineers from California Scientists from California Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Sun Microsystems people Turing Award laureates California Institute of Technology faculty Harvard University faculty University of Utah faculty California Institute of Technology alumni Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering alumni Scarsdale High School alumni People from Hastings, Nebraska People from Scarsdale, New York 20th-century American engineers 21st-century American engineers 20th-century American scientists 21st-century American scientists Scientists from New York (state) American people of Scottish descent Engineers from New York (state) Engineers from Nebraska American people of New Zealand descent UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty Kyoto laureates in Advanced Technology Inventors from Nebraska