HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

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 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern t ...
in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was also a professor at Syracuse University after leaving MIT. Steven Coons had a vision of interactive
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 dea ...
as a design tool to aid the engineer.


Work

While a student at MIT, Steven Anson Coons was employed by the Chance Vought Aircraft Company, in the Master Dimensions Department. He developed a new conic curve based on the unit square. He published a report entitled ''An Analytic Method for Calculations of the Contours of Double Curved Surfaces.'' The surface was controlled by one through seventh order polynomials and each curve was express as being one unit long and the element plane in a unit square. The polynomials are written: : z=f(d) \textd = \frac and : z = a_0 + ad + a_2d^2 + \cdots + a_7 d^7 This concept allows for the approximate matching of any curve, conic or not. The surface element plane normally a conic curve was expressed as: : c = f(\Phi,u,w,\theta) \text \, By selecting proper values for Φ (similar to ''K'' in the conic family) in this equation: : \Phi u(w-1) + (w-u)^2 = 0 \, the curve will be fixed. By arbitrarily choosing values of Φ, ''u'' and ''w'' could be solved for: : u = \frac ,\, w = 1 - \theta(u) During World War II, he worked on the design of aircraft surfaces, developing the mathematics to describe generalized " surface patches." At MIT's Electronic Systems Laboratory he investigated the mathematical formulation for these patches, and published one of the most significant contributions to the area of geometric design, a treatise which has become known as "The Little Red Book" in 1967. His " Coons patch" was a formulation that presented the notation, mathematical foundation, and intuitive interpretation of an idea that would ultimately become the foundation for surface descriptions that are commonly used today, such as
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 express ...
surfaces, NURB surfaces, etc. His technique for describing a surface was to construct it out of collections of adjacent patches, which had continuity constraints that would allow surfaces to have curvature which was expected by the designer. Each patch was defined by four boundary curves, and a set of "
blending function In mathematics, a basis function is an element of a particular basis for a function space. Every function in the function space can be represented as a linear combination of basis functions, just as every vector in a vector space can be represe ...
s" that defined how the interior was constructed out of interpolated values of the boundaries. Coons's students included
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 ...
and Lawrence Roberts, both of whom went on to make numerous contributions to computer graphics and (in Roberts' case) to computer networks. Coons also advised Nicholas Negropontebr>
Coons co-authored, with John Thomas Rule, a book on mechanical drawing and graphic methods entitled ''Graphics'' c. 1961.


Steven A. Coons Award

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 membe ...
SIGGRAPH SIGGRAPH (Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques) is an annual conference on computer graphics (CG) organized by the ACM SIGGRAPH, starting in 1974. The main conference is held in North America; SIGGRAPH Asia, ...
has an award named for Coons. The Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics is given in odd-numbered years to an individual to honor that person's lifetime contribution to computer graphics and interactive techniques. It is considered the field's most prestigious award.


Recipients

* Markus Gross (2021) * Michael F. Cohen (2019) * Jessica Hodgins (2017) * Henry Fuchs (2015) * Turner Whitted (2013) * Jim Kajiya (2011) * Robert L. Cook (2009) * Nelson Max (2007) * Tomoyuki Nishita (2005) *
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 al ...
(2003) * Lance J. Williams (2001) * James F. Blinn (1999) * James D. Foley (1997) *
José Luis Encarnação José Luis Moreira da Encarnação is a Portuguese computer scientist, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany and a senior technology and innovation advisor to governments, mul ...
(1995) * Edwin Catmull (1993) *
Andries van Dam Andries "Andy" van Dam (born December 8, 1938) is a Dutch-American professor of computer science and former vice-president for research at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Together with Ted Nelson he contributed to the first hy ...
(1991) * David C. Evans (1989) * Donald P. Greenberg (1987) *
Pierre Bézier Pierre Étienne Bézier (1 September 1910 – 25 November 1999; ) was a French engineer and one of the founders of the fields of solid, geometric and physical modelling as well as in the field of representing curves, especially in computer-ai ...
(1985) * Ivan E. Sutherland (1983)


Research Papers

*T.B. Sheridan, Steven A. Coons and H.M.Paynter, SOME NOVEL DISPLAY TECHNIQUES FOR DRIVING SIMULATION IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON HUMAN FACTORS IN ENGINEERING vol. HFE5 (1) 29, 1964. *Steven A. Coons, COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND INNOVATIVE ENGINEERING DESIGN – SUPER-SCULPTOR, DATAMATION 12 (5) 32–34, 1966. *Steven A. Coons, USES OF COMPUTERS IN TECHNOLOGY, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 215 (3) 177, 1966. *D.V. Ahuja and Steven A. Coons, GEOMETRY FOR CONSTRUCTION AND DISPLAY, IBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL 7 (3–4) 188, 1968. *Steven A. Coons, MODIFICATION OF SHAPE OF PIECEWISE CURVES, COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN 9 (3) 178–180, 1977. *Steven A. Coons, CONSTRAINED LEAST-SQUARES, COMPUTERS & GRAPHICS 3 (1) 43–47, 1978. {{DEFAULTSORT:Coons, Steven Anson MIT School of Engineering faculty 1979 deaths 1912 births Computer graphics researchers