Biography
Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist and animator who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios . [ 3 ] [ 4 ] [ 5 ] He has been recognized for his contributions to 3-D computer graphics , including the 2019 ACM Turing Award . Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia . [ 6 ] His family later moved to Salt Lake City , Utah , where his father first served as principal of Granite High School and then of Taylorsville High School . [ 7 ] [ 8 ] Early in his life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies, including Peter Pan and Pinocchio , and wanted to be an animator; however, after finishing high school, he had no idea how to get there as there were no animation schools around that time. Because he also liked math and physics, he chose a scientific career instead. [ 9 ] He also made animation using flip-books . Catmull graduated in 1969, with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the University of Utah . [ 6 ] [ 8 ] Initially interested in designing programming languages , Catmull encountered Ivan Sutherland , who had designed the computer drawing program Sketchpad , and changed [ vague ] his interest to digital imaging . [ 10 ] As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's DARPA program, [ 11 ] sharing classes with James H. Clark , John Warnock and Alan Kay . [ 8 ] Fields: Computer science Education: University of Utah BS MS PhD Award Citation: Academy Award (1993, 1996, 2001, 2008) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2006) Computer History Museum Fellow (2013) ACM Turing Award (2019)
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)