Steven A. Coons
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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 at Syracuse University after leaving MIT. Steven Coons had a vision of interactive computer graphics 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 patch In technical applications of 3D computer graphics ( CAx) such as computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing, surfaces are one way of representing objects. The other ways are wireframe (lines and curves) and solids. Point clouds ...
es." 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 In mathematics, a Coons patch, is a type of surface patch or manifold parametrization used in computer graphics to smoothly join other surfaces together, and in computational mechanics applications, particularly in finite element method and bo ...
" 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 expresse ...
surfaces,
NURB Non-uniform rational basis spline (NURBS) is a mathematical model using basis splines (B-splines) that is commonly used in computer graphics for representing curves and surfaces. It offers great flexibility and precision for handling both analyt ...
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 repres ...
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 member ...
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 Michael F. Cohen is an American computer scientist and researcher in computer graphics. He was a senior research scientist at Microsoft Research for 21 years until he joined Facebook Research in 2015. In 1998, he received the ACM SIGGRAPH CG Achie ...
(2019) *
Jessica Hodgins Jessica K. Hodgins is an American roboticist and researcher who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute and School of Computer Science. Hodgins is currently also Research Director at the Facebook AI Research lab in Pittsburgh next ...
(2017) *
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 ...
(2015) *
Turner Whitted John Turner Whitted is an electrical engineer and computer scientist who introduced recursive ray tracing to the computer graphics community with his 1979 paper "An improved illumination model for shaded display". His algorithm proved to be a pract ...
(2013) * Jim Kajiya (2011) * Robert L. Cook (2009) *
Nelson Max Nelson Max is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1967, advised by Herman Gluck. His research ...
(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 algo ...
(2003) * Lance J. Williams (2001) *
James F. Blinn James F. Blinn (born 1949) is an American computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), particularly his work on the pre-encounter animations for the Voyag ...
(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 hyper ...
(1991) *
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 ...
(1989) *
Donald P. Greenberg Donald Peter Greenberg (born 1934) is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. Early life Greenberg earned his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Cornell University, where he played on the tennis and soccer ...
(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 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 ...
(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