Greg Turk

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Greg Turk is a researcher in the field of computer graphics and an Associate Professor at Georgia Tech. His paper, Zippered polygon meshes from range images, concerning the reconstruction of surfaces from point data, introduced the Stanford Bunny, a frequently used example object in computer graphics. He is also known for his work on simplification of surfaces, and on reaction-diffusion based texture synthesis.

Turk was born in July of 1961. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill under the supervision of Henry Fuchs in 1992, and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University before joining the Georgia Tech faculty in 1994.^[1] The following year, in 1995, he was awarded an NSF CAREER Award, one of the most prestigious awards granted by the NSF to new faculty.^[2] He is the technical papers chair of SIGGRAPH 2008.^[3]

Dr. Turk went to Santa Monica High School in the 1970s, where he was a member of the Olive Starlight Orchestra. He did his undergraduate work at UCLA, where he was unable to get into the mathematics program, and went into computer science instead, which led to hand-writing among his friends to the effect that he wouldn't be able to make a "contribution" in computers in the same way he could in math; this concern was proven false, as Dr. Turk has become a minor luminary in the world of computer graphics, and a mentor to many students in the same field.

Turk played guitar in a short-lived band while he attended UCLA; it called itself "Industrial Waist," and also featured Jack Watt (on drums; he was Jackie Watt back then), Paul Lockhart (lead vocals, guitar), Keith Goldfarb (bass) and Alex Melnick (the band's original drummer).

As a former mathematician, Turk is, of course, a fan of Lewis Carroll, and for many years his trademark was a Cheshire Cat grin; later, he fell in love with fractals, to the point that his alter ego on Joy McCann's blog is "Professor Fractal." He has been called "the only truly nice guy left in the universe," and lives in Atlanta with his wife, his daughter, and his son. He and <a href=http://accidentalmind.org/>David Linden</a> squabble about who is the better father, with each suspecting that the other has the edge; they are both, of course, passionately devoted to their children.

[edit] Selected publications

Turk G, Levoy M. (1994) Zippered polygon meshes from range images. In: Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 311–318 (ISBN 0-89791-667-0) (cited 627 times)^[4]
Turk G. (1992) Re-tiling polygonal surfaces. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics 26: 55–64 (cited 576 times)^[4]
Cohen J, Varshney A, Manocha D, Turk G et al. (1996) Simplification envelopes. In: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 119–128 (ISBN 0-89791-746-4) (cited 464 times)^[4]