[kristopolous]

That's Ivan Sutherland though. He's one of the living legends of computing.

His doctor advisor was Claude Shannon and some of his students include the founder of Adobe, The founder of SGI and the creators of both Phong and Gouraud shading.

He also ran the pioneering firm Evans & Sutherland, a graphics research company starting in the 1960s. They produced things like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_Drawing_System-1

He was a key person during the Utah school of computing's most influential years - when the Newell's famous Teapot came out for instance.

Saying his predictions are right on is kinda like saying Jony Ives predictions about what smartphones would look like was accurate

[pixelpoet]

I always fund it amusing that Phong was actually the guy's given name, but Vietnamese family name ordering isn't the same as in the US so everyone thought it was his surname and just rolled with it.

[dreamcompiler]

I've used Phong interpolation for decades and never knew this. I also didn't know he died of cancer two years after getting his PhD.

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

[kristopolous]

Yes! He is greatly missed among his colleagues. I went to an event in Utah in 2013 and multiple people spoke quite fondly of him, including Blinn and Jim Clark.

When they were showing old photos of Ivans VW Bug they were taking measurements of, there was an obvious grief pause whenever he was in one.

There's videos of these on YouTube. I sat next to Sutherland in the room btw

That is 2nd to when I had a buffet breakfast showing up early to an event when it was just me and woz in the room and I talked to him for an hour not realizing who he was.

Actually my bullshit flags went up thinking "this guy sure likes to tell fantastic exaggerated stories!"

Kinda like talking to, say Harrison Schmitt, not knowing him, and saying "you? Landed on the moon? Sure old man. Stepped foot on the moon... then you were a senator? alright."

[dreamcompiler]

Schmitt's one of our local heroes here in New Mexico. He's the only moonwalker who was not a military aviator. (He's a geologist.)

I'm not a big fan of his climate change denialism but yeah, he did walk on the moon.

[sehansen]

Reminds of this Neil Gaiman anecdote about imposter syndrome:

"""Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.

On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”

And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”

And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. """

from: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-a...

[kristopolous]

Correction, 2023...

[nxobject]

NB: Sutherland is co-directs a lab on asynchronous logic with a colleague at Portland State. As the site says: "Please visit us when you are in the neighborhood!" The lab takes summer students, too, although Portland State is broke so don't expect compensation.

https://arc.cecs.pdx.edu

[Tuna-Fish]

Yeah. Ivan Sutherland did not predict the future. He decided what the future should be and made it happen.