Martin Newell (computer scientist)
Martin Newell | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Utah |
| Known for | Utah Teapot |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Xerox PARC Adobe Systems |
Martin Newell is a British-born computer scientist specializing in computer graphics who is perhaps best known as the creator of the Utah teapot.
Before emigrating to the USA, he worked at what was then the Computer-Aided Design Centre (CADCentre) in Cambridge, UK,[1] along with his brother Dr. Richard (Dick) Newell (who went on to co-found two of the most important UK graphics software companies - Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS) in 1977 and Smallworld in 1987). At CADCentre, the two Newells and Tom Sancha developed Newell's algorithm, a technique for eliminating cyclic dependencies when ordering polygons to be drawn by a computer graphics system.[2][3]
Martin Newell developed the Newell teapot while working on a Ph.D. at the University of Utah,[4] where he also helped develop a version of the painter's algorithm for rendering. He graduated in 1975, and was on the Utah faculty from 1977 to 1979.[5] Later he worked at Xerox PARC, where he worked on JaM, a predecessor of PostScript. JaM stood for "John and Martin" - the John was John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems. They also developed MaJ, which stood for "Martin and John"
He founded the computer-aided design software company Ashlar in 1988.[5] In 2007 Martin Newell was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.[6] He recently retired as an Adobe Fellow at Adobe Systems.[6]
References
- ^ van Dam, Andries (1998), "Some Personal Recollections on Graphics Standards", SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Newsletter, 32 (1).
- ^ Sutherland, Ivan E.; Sproull, Robert F.; Schumacker, Robert A. (1974), "A characterization of ten hidden-surface algorithms", Computing Surveys, 6 (1): 1–55, doi:10.1145/356625.356626.
- ^ Newell, M. E.; Newell, R. G.; Sancha, T. L. (1972), "A new approach to the shaded picture problem", Proc. ACM National Conference, pp. 443–450.
- ^ Torrence, Ann (2006), "Martin Newell's original teapot", SIGGRAPH '06, New York, NY, USA: ACM, doi:10.1145/1180098.1180128, ISBN 1-59593-364-6, Article No. 29.
- ^ a b History of the University of Utah School of Computing, retrieved 2010-01-26.
- ^ a b NAE member directory, retrieved 2010-01-26.