Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by asafira 2781 days ago
From the post: "Ray tracing was invented by Turner Whitted around 1980."

I believe that Turner probably did some great things, but somehow I don't think I believe he invented ray tracing. Ray tracing has been around for so long in physics...

1 comments

Whitted published the first paper applying recursive ray tracing to the problem of rendering an image. Quibbling over this is like saying no one invented compute graphics because Renaissance artists knew how projection worked.
I am sorry you feel that way =/; I understand it was a picky comment, but quibbling over it is far from the gross overstatement you mentioned.