Ivan Sutherland

Ivan Sutherland is an American computer scientist and electrical engineer regarded as the father of computer graphics and, through Sketchpad, the originator of the lineage that became computer-aided design. As a PhD student at MIT he wrote Sketchpad, a Man-Machine Graphical Communication System (1963), the first interactive program letting a user draw and manipulate geometric figures directly on a screen with a light pen, including hierarchical drawings and constraint satisfaction; it is recognized as the ancestor of both the graphical user interface and modern CAD software. He went on to head ARPA's Information Processing Techniques Office (1964), teach at Harvard and the University of Utah, where his students included Alan Kay, Edwin Catmull and other founders of the computer-graphics field, and in 1968 co-found Evans and Sutherland with David Evans, a pioneer of real-time 3D graphics hardware. Later positions included Caltech, Sun Microsystems as a vice president and fellow, and, since 2009, the Asynchronous Research Center he co-founded with Marly Roncken at Portland State University, where he continues research into self-timed, asynchronous circuit design. He received the ACM A.M. Turing Award in 1988 for his pioneering contributions to computer graphics beginning with Sketchpad, and the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology in 2012.