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For the Sketchpad computer-aided design system and for lifelong contributions to computer graphics and education.
"If you want to know about the future, ask the young people who will make it happen. The older generation may have used up its vision getting us where we are." |
Ivan Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska, in 1938. He received a B.S. from Carnegie-Mellon University (1959); an M.S. from California Institute of Technology (1960); and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1963).
Sutherland's Ph.D. dissertation, "Sketchpad: A Man Machine Graphical Communication System," was a groundbreaking interactive computer-aided design system. Its innovations included hierarchical drawings, constraint-satisfaction methods, and an interactive graphical user interface. Sketchpad's graceful interaction and functionality inspire admiration among computer graphics professionals even today, over forty years later.
From 1964-66, Sutherland was director of the Information Processing Techniques office of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), and he guided computer research across the United States, particularly in the areas of timesharing and artificial intelligence. In 1968, he joined colleague David Evans to build a center of computer graphics research at the University of Utah and to found with him the Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation.
From 1976 to 1980, Dr. Sutherland served as chairman of computer science at the California Institute of Technology; from 1980 on he was a vice president of the small consulting firm Sutherland, Sproull and Associates which Sun acquired in 1990 to form the basis of its Research Laboratory.
Currently Sutherland is a vice president and fellow at Sun Microsystems. He has won many awards for his work including the ACM Turing Award (1988); the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1986); and the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (1998). He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.