Ivan Edward Sutherland (born
1938 in
Hastings, Nebraska) is an
American computer scientist and
Internet pioneer. He received the
Turing Award in
1988 for the invention of
Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of
graphical user interface that has become ubiquitous in
personal computers.
Sutherland earned his
Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the
Carnegie Institute of Technology (now
Carnegie Mellon University), his
Master's degree from
Caltech, and his Ph.D. from
MIT in
EECS in 1963. He is a member of the
National Academy of Engineering, as well as the
National Academy of Sciences. In 1994 he was inducted as a
Fellow of the
Association for Computing Machinery.
He invented
Sketchpad, an innovative program that influenced alternative forms of interaction with computers. Sketchpad could accept constraints and specified relationships among segments and arcs, including the diameter of arcs. It could draw both horizontal and vertical lines and combine them into figures and shapes. Figures could be copied, moved, rotated, or resized, retaining their basic properties. Sketchpad also had the first window-drawing program and clipping algorithm, which allowed zooming. Sketchpad ran on the
Lincoln TX-2 computer and influenced
Douglas Engelbart's On-Line System. Sketchpad, in turn, was influenced by the conceptual
Memex as envisioned by
Vannevar Bush in his famous paper "
As We May Think."
Sutherland replaced
J. C. R. Licklider as the head of ARPA, now known as
DARPA, when Licklider returned to MIT in.
From 1966 to 1968 he was an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at
Harvard University. With the help of his student
Bob Sproull he created what is widely considered to be the first
virtual reality and
augmented reality head-mounted display system in 1968. It was primitive both in terms of
user interface and
realism, and the head-mounted display to be worn by the user was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling, and the
graphics comprising the
virtual environment were simple
wireframe model rooms. The formidable appearance of the device inspired its name,
The Sword of Damocles.
From 1968 to 1974, Sutherland was a professor at the
University of Utah. Among his students there were
Alan Kay, inventor of the
Smalltalk language,
Henri Gouraud who devised the
Gouraud shading technique, and
Frank Crow, who went on to develop
antialiasing methods.
In 1968 he co-founded
Evans and Sutherland with his friend and colleague
David Evans. The company has done pioneering work in the field of real-time hardware, accelerated
3D computer graphics, and
printer languages.
Former employees of Evans and Sutherland included the future founders of
Adobe (
John Warnock) and
Silicon Graphics (
Jim Clark).
From 1974 to 1978 he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science at
California Institute of Technology, where he was the founding head of that school's Computer Science department. He then founded a consulting firm, Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was purchased by Sun Microsystems to form the seed of its research division, Sun Labs.
Dr. Sutherland is currently a Vice President and Fellow at
Sun Microsystems and is a visiting scholar in the Computer Science Division at
University of California, Berkeley (Fall 2005 - Spring 2008). He has two children, Juliet and Dean, and four grandchildren, Belle, Robert, William and Rose.
On May 28, 2006, Ivan Sutherland married Marly Roncken.
Ivan's older brother,
Bert Sutherland, is also a prominent computer science researcher.
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