[wiz21c]

The father of all of this is William Latham.

https://www.doc.gold.ac.uk/~mas01whl/

(or John Conway, but that's another league)

[sampo]

Lindenmayer (born 1925) and Prusinkiewicz (born 1952) are older.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristid_Lindenmayer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przemys%C5%82aw_Prusinkiewicz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algorithmic_Beauty_of_Plan...

[hapticdata]

Hard to define a beginning but "The Algorists" such as Roman Verostko, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr are probably a better reference for a starting point http://www.verostko.com/algorist.html

Or possibly Lillian Schwartz's work at Bell Labs http://lillian.com/