Ivan Sutherland

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Ivan Edward Sutherland

Born	1938 Hastings, Nebraska
Field	Computer Science Internet
Institution	Harvard University University of Utah Evans and Sutherland California Institute of Technology Sun Microsystems
Known for	Sketchpad
Notable prizes	Turing Award

Ivan Edward Sutherland (born 1938 in Hastings, Nebraska) is a computer programmer and Internet pioneer. He received the Turing Award in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the graphical user interface that became ubiquitous in personal computers.

Sutherland earned his Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), his Master's degree from Caltech, and his Ph.D. from MIT in EECS in 1963. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Sciences.

He was the inventor of Sketchpad, 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's On-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual Memex as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "As We May Think."

From 1966 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard University. With the help of his student Bob Sproull he created what is widely considered to be the first virtual reality and augmented reality head-mounted display system in 1968. It was primitive both in terms of user interface and realism, and the head-mounted display to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the graphics comprising the virtual environment were simple wireframe model rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name, The Sword of Damocles.

From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the University of Utah. Among his students there were Alan Kay, inventor of the Smalltalk language, Henri Gouraud who devised the Gouraud shading technique, and Frank Crow, who went on to develop antialiasing methods.

In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated 3D computer graphics, and printer languages. Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of Adobe (John Warnock) and Silicon Graphics (Jim Clark).

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 to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.

Dr. Sutherland is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2007). He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose.

On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.

[edit] Quotes

• "A display connected to a digital computer gives us a chance to gain familiarty with concepts not realizable in the physical world. It is a looking glass into a mathematical wonderland."
• "I just need to figure out how things work."
• "It's very satisfying to take a problem we thought difficult and find a simple solution. The best solutions are always simple."

[edit] External links

• Technology And Courage
• SketchPad
• Ivan Sutherland, Sun Fellow and V.P
• Sutherland's Ph.D. Thesis, Sketchpad, A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. His thesis supervisor was Claude Shannon, father of information theory.
• An Evening with Ivan Sutherland at the Computer History Museum on 19-Oct-2005: »Research and Fun« (online video and partial transcript)

[edit] References

• Biography
• Sutherland's contributions to computer science

Persondata
NAME	Sutherland, Ivan Edward
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Computer programmer, Internet pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH	1938
PLACE OF BIRTH	Hastings, Nebraska
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH