Biography
Patrick M. Hanrahan (born May 8, 1955) [ 1 ] 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 algorithms , graphics processing units , as well as scientific illustration and visualization . [ 2 ] He has received numerous awards, including the 2019 Turing Award . Hanrahan grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin . He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and graduated with a B.S. in nuclear engineering in 1977, [ 3 ] continued his education there, and as a graduate student taught a new computer science course in graphics in 1981. One of his first students was an art graduate student, Donna Cox , now known for her art and scientific visualizations . [ 4 ] In the 1980s he went to work at the New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Laboratory and at Digital Equipment Corporation under Edwin Catmull . [ 5 ] He returned to U.W. Madison and completed his Ph.D. in biophysics in 1985. [ 6 ] [ 7 ] As a founding employee at Pixar Animation Studios, from 1986 to 1989 Hanrahan was part of the design of the RenderMan Interface Specification and the RenderMan Shading Language . [ 8 ] [ 9 ] He was credited in Pixar productions including The Magic Egg (1984), Tin Toy (1988) and Toy Story (1995). [ 10 ] Fields: Computer graphics Education: University of Wisconsin, Madison BS MS PhD
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)