
Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award - oscarwao
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/technology/pixar-pioneers-win-1-million-turing-award.html
======
drallison
Pat Hanrahan is a friend and colleague at Stanford. For years, he occupied the
office next door in the Gates Building. He's smart and insightful, gracious,
thoughtful, well spoken, and open--social virtues which amplify intellectual
skills. While the Turing Award cites his work in computer graphics, he has
made significant contributions is other areas.

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ihaveajob
Nice to see computer graphics pioneers being recognized. Reading Ed Catmull's
name always brings fond memories of learning mesh processing techniques they
first thought of, like the Catmull-Clark subdivision
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivis...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivision_surface)).
Elegant stuff.

~~~
pixelpoet
I think the later development of mixed triangle/quad subdivision by Warren and
Schaefer is even more elegant, besides being more general:
[http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/research/tutorial.pdf](http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/research/tutorial.pdf)

~~~
ihaveajob
Ah, the Stanford bunny. It's been a decade since I last worked with it in grad
school, but I can't help feeling fond for the little guy. We spent hours and
hours of frustration together.

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gregfjohnson
Pat Hanrahan and I were CS grad students at the University of Wisconsin
Madison at the same time. In addition to being brilliant, Pat was kind,
egoless, and infectiously happy. He was just a fun person to be around. I
haven't seen Pat since grad school days, but I'm sure it's as true now as it
was then!

Amusing side note: Brian Paul, who wrote the mesa open source implementation
of OpenGL, was a Wisconsin grad student at the same time! He was in the
meteorology department, in the building across the street from computer
science.

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denzil_correa
> In the early 1970s, Dr. Catmull was a Ph.D. student at the University of
> Utah under one of the founding fathers of computer graphics, Ivan
> Sutherland.

Off topic - I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with Ivan Sutherland,
also a Turing award winner [0]. Ivan was one of the most "fun" scientists I
have met and spoken with. His conversations were full with humor and humility.

I was walking past the street where Ivan (he insisted to call me that) was
having a coffee. He asked me if I'd like to join him for one - pleasantly
surprised, I said yes. The next 45m was Ivan telling me about a research
problem he was working on and asking "tips" on how I would solve it.
Initially, I was hesitant but he insisted and took me along a journey inside
his wonderful mind.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland)

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taneq
Back when I was a wee young graphics programmer I taught myself to use
Catmull-Rom splines to interpolate between camera positions (among many other
things) for some stuff I was doing. Great to see one of the inventors getting
recognition of all the cool stuff he's done!

~~~
DubiousPusher
I thought for years they were invented by three people, Cat, Mull and Rom.

~~~
hinkley
I think I might have wondered who Cat Mullrom is and whether her mother
insists on calling her Catherine...

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Keyframe
Hanrahan absolute beast of a mind. Work at Stanford, RSL, and tableau.
Absolutely deserves it. Catmull escaped prison I guess? Great work though.

~~~
corysama
lol. I came here to type “Hanrahan is a beast.” He has been involved with so
much impressive work for so many years. I don’t know how he does it.

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mentos
I recommend Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc about the founding of Pixar.

~~~
locallost
Recently read it. The first part of how Pixar came to be was really really
interesting. From his days in research to Lucas Arts/Film to Jobs. The rest
was also a good read. I also recommend it.

edit: and then a couple posts later I read, of course, things are never as
they seem. Depressing.

~~~
greggman3
What I got from the book is how much luck was involved (which Mr. Catmull
acknowledges). If Lucas had not sold them. If Lucas had sold them to someone
other than Steve Jobs. If Steve Jobs had not been willing to blow 70 million
on them as a computer company. If Steve Jobs had not allowed them to pivot to
animation after blowing 70 million on them as a computer company. If any one
of those things had not happened Pixar would likely not exist and Mr. Catmull
would likely just be another employee of some other company.

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musicale
I kind of wish ACM had mentioned the names of Pat Hanrahan's grad student(s)
who worked on Brook, the predecessor of Nvidia's CUDA.

Though they did mention Marc Levoy, his Stanford colleague and coauthor on the
light field paper.

~~~
flafla2
I recently implemented Levoy & Hanrahan in a game engine—a genuinely great
read and easy to digest. One of my favorite papers in CG/Comp Photo.

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sitkack
Pat Hanrahan is a wonderful soul. I talked to him after a talk he gave and he
was super nice and not judgmental.

I don't have the same opinion about Ed Catmull. His wage fixing really
saddened me. To remove agency from peoples lives for profit of Pixar is an
unconscionable act. He curtailed lives for his own gain.

------
neonate
[https://archive.md/mAhJd](https://archive.md/mAhJd)

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tayistay
Having worked at Pixar, I think Catmull's wage-fixing involvement should
absolutely disqualify him from receiving the Turing Award.

And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing.
Z-buffering is obvious. Those were the days of low hanging fruit in graphics.

~~~
pcwalton
> And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing.

And the fact that Catmull-Clark is based on recursive refinement makes it
really bad for GPU evaluation (or parallel evaluation in general). It's
completely incompatible with hardware tessellation, for example.

If I had to pick an especially non-obvious, elegant, and useful 1980s graphics
technique, Pineda rasterization would come to mind.

~~~
tayistay
Subdivision surfaces aren't so bad on the GPU. Since each limit vertex is a
linear combination of control vertices, you can precompute the stencils to
evaluate limit vertices. Those stencils can all be evaluated in parallel in a
compute kernel. Generally, the base mesh topology isn't changing in an
animation, so this works fairly well.

For Catmull-Clark, the regular parts of the mesh (quads with valence 4
vertices) are just b-splines and thus can be evaluated using the hardware
tessellator.

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ohazi
I had the good fortune of taking Hanrahan's introductory computer graphics
class at Stanford several years ago.

He's a great teacher and the class was a lot of fun. Seemed like a genuinely
nice guy as well. Congratulations!

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kristianov
IMHO Pat deserves another Turing Award for creating Tableau.

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lostinroutine
For those troubled by the paywall: it doesn't appear if you disable
javascript. I used my uBlock origin to do so.

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NelsonMinar
Has Catmull changed his opinion on his participation in illegally colluding
with Google, Apple, etc to keep employee wages low?
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-
goo...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-google-no-
poaching-evidence-triggers-more-lawsuits)

~~~
alanbernstein
For extremely high values of "low"...

~~~
glitchdout
Collusion is collusion. By keeping salaries lower at the tech giants, they
kept salaries lower in the whole tech industry.

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peapicker
Can we link to the ACM award site and its article instead of the NYT paywall?

[https://amturing.acm.org/](https://amturing.acm.org/)

~~~
dang
The NYT article has some additional context, including quotes from interviews.
Generally we prefer an article like that to press releases, unless it's an
unusually interesting press release.

Paywalls suck, of course, but HN's rule is that it's ok as long as there's a
workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the threads, including in this
thread.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20paywalls%20suck&sort=byDate&type=comment)

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mdre
Cool, maybe Ed could split his part between all the workers he exploited.

~~~
tomashubelbauer
I didn't know about this so I looked it up:

> The plaintiffs in the lawsuit presented substantial evidence that implicated
> Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull as a ringleader
> of the illegal wage-fixing scheme. The Walt Disney Company has done nothing
> to reprimand or punish Catmull for his questionable actions, and he
> continues to serve as the leader for both Disney and Pixar animation
> studios.

[https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-
workers-...](https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-workers-set-
to-receive-170-million-payout-from-wage-theft-lawsuit-161482.html)

Pretty damning if true. Anyone got a better/additional source?

~~~
mdre
What's really funny is that this guy had the balls to publish a book named
"Creativity inc." which talked about the "culture of candor", the egalitarian
culture of Pixar... much of this talk was later challenged by numerous women
who opened up about the sexism and misogyny they'd faced there. And of course
the other guy that founded Pixar, John Lasseter, turned out to be a molester
and so was laid off. Great company!

~~~
toyg
The two things need not be exclusive: you can have a company that is
egalitarian and candid _in matters related to the actual creative work_ and
definitely _superior to other companies at the time_ , and still have issues
at the interpersonal level. I can think a person is unlikeable and stay as
away as possible from them, and then have a productive conversation with them
in an open meeting that advances the company output. Even the Beatles didn't
like each other that much, and I'm sure the production of Casablanca was
plagued by "couches", but they still made masterpieces that were superior to
anything seen before.

~~~
therealcamino
Well, they don't need to be exclusive as long as you're in the group that's
not being excluded or treated badly. If you are, then you don't have the
luxury of ignoring it and separating those issues so cleanly.

~~~
toyg
I agree, but those groups have _always_ had that problem, and progress on that
front is orthogonal to other issues.

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m12k
Does that mean we can conclusively say they are human?

~~~
chrisseaton
That's the Turing Test. This is the Turing Award - it's an academic
achievement award. They're just named after the same person - they're not
related otherwise.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You just failed both! :).

~~~
chrisseaton
The Turing Award isn't a test - you can't fail it any more than you fail to
win a Nobel Prize.

~~~
NikolaeVarius
Obviously have never had Asian parents

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ur-whale
Catmull reminds me of Fritz Haber [1] in that he both invented amazingly
useful tech. while being an absolutely horrible human being.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber)

~~~
jansan
Fritz Haber is such a tragic character. Saved the world from hunger by
inventing the process for ammonium fertilizer, helped to kill thousands by
being a central figure in building up German chemical weapons for WWI, tried
to extract gold from seawater to pay Germany's WWI debt but of course failed.
He was a huge patriot, but being a Jew, he had to go on exile to England,
where he died.

~~~
mikhailfranco
A nod to the graciousness of England, not just for accepting him as a refugee,
but for those former military enemies and chemical warfare competitors, who
actively helped him by offering a position at Cambridge:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Death](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Death)

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phtrivier
So now, Disney also wins Turing Award. Can't wait for anything that's not an
excuse for showing ads to earn recognition.

~~~
caleb-allen
Disney didn't win anything. Catmull and Hanrahan have had an incredibly large
impact on computer graphics.

~~~
phtrivier
Of course.

Sometimes you don't sleep enough, write stupid comments, and wonder why HN
does not _always_ show a 'delete' button.

~~~
caleb-allen
Fair enough!

