J. Turner Whitted

Turner Whitted introduced recursive ray tracing to the computer graphics community with his 1979 paper.[1][2] His algorithm proved to be a practical method of simulating global illumination, inspired many variations, and is in wide use today. Simple recursive implementations of ray tracing are still occasionally referred to as Whitted-style ray tracing.[3] He received his PhD from North Carolina State University in 1978[4] and then joined Bell Labs. He later worked at Microsoft Research.

Whitted is currently an Adjunct Research Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.[5] He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering[6] and was awarded the Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics in 2013.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Whitted T. (1979) An improved illumination model for shaded display. Proceedings of the 6th annual conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques
  2. ↑ Furht, Borko (2010-03-10). Handbook of Multimedia for Digital Entertainment and Arts. Springer. pp. 531–. ISBN 9780387890241. Retrieved 27 May 2014.
  3. ↑ Kurachi, Noriko (2011-06-01). The Magic of Computer Graphics. CRC Press. pp. 19–. ISBN 9781568815770. Retrieved 27 May 2014.
  4. ↑ "Article: Featured Alumnus". Ece.ncsu.edu. Retrieved 2014-05-22.
  5. ↑ "Adjunct Faculty — Department of Computer Science". Cs.unc.edu. Retrieved 2014-05-22.
  6. ↑ "NAE Website - Dr. J. Turner Whitted". Nae.edu. Retrieved 2014-05-22.
  7. ↑ "ACM SIGGRAPH Awards | SIGGRAPH 2013". S2013.siggraph.org. Retrieved 2014-05-22.