[caminante]

> That Bùi’s life story remains so unknown, to others in his field as well as to the broader public, seems to exemplify racist stereotypes about technically skilled but otherwise faceless Asians, and reflects an unwillingness to reckon with Asian American history.

Hold up. This seems forced.

What would've driven this fellow to household recognition? Even his billionaire, surviving peer, Ed Catmull, and the commercial face of Pixar isn't a household name.

[simplicio]

Yea, looking at the list of "Computer Graphics Pioneers" on wikipedia, Mandelbrot and maybe Carmack are the only two I'd think would be recognized by the broader public, and Carmack is the only one I personally could tell you any biographical details about.

I don't think there's any reason to think Bùi's obscurity is due to any particular prejudice against Asian Americans.

[jvanderbot]

I guarantee you I could ask any member of my family, including my wife, if they've heard of Mandelbrot or John Carmack, and they'd say "no".

This is indeed a bit forced.

[mitthrowaway2]

Anecdote of one, but I had heard of Phong but not Catmull, actually. (Because I was curious about Phong lighting, so then read the wikipedia article which pointed me to him). Your comment is the first time I'd ever heard of Ed Catmull.

[schoen]

I tried to extract everything that looked like a name from the History section of the Wikipedia article on computer graphics.

I had heard of Bui Tuong Phong, Henri Gouraud, Ivan Sutherland, John Carmack, John Warnock, Martin Newell, and Nelson Max.

I hadn't heard of Arthur Appel, Dave Evans, David Immel, David Pearson, Edwin Catmull, Elizabeth Waldram, Frank Sinden, Fred Parke, James Clark, James Kajiya, Jim Blinn, Ken Knowlton, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Noll, Ralph Baer, Steve Russell, Tom Stockham, Verne Hudson, William Fetter, or William Higinbotham.

I haven't studied computer graphics, other than doing the Raytracing in One Weekend project.

(Oops, I missed people with accented, abbreviated, or uncapitalized names, like Pierre Bézier, David C. Evans, and Paul de Casteljau. I don't think this will change the ratio much, though.)

[CyberDildonics]

I agree this is ridiculous. Anyone in computer graphics knows his name.

People don't know his life story just because he was the first to interpolate normals between the vertices of triangles for smooth shading and created an exponential falloff for a highlight.

If he didn't do that first, someone else would have done it pretty quickly after, but in the 70s 3D computer graphics was so niche there were only a few people in the world with access to enough memory to hold a single color image.

Also the title saying he made toy story possible is ridiculous clickbait. He had nothing to do with toy story and it came many years after his work.

Not only that toy story was done with renderman and curved patches that were broken down into pixel sized polygons with highlights that were probably similar to blinn, so it's actually an example of phong interpolation and shading not being used.

This is overall terrible journalism that makes distant connections to pop culture for clickbait.

[EasyMark]

I'm not sure. Pretty much all but 0.000001% of us tech peeps go completely unnoticed by the general public no matter how awesome our contributions to tech without regard to race, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic identity...