About Edwin Catmull
Edwin Earl Catmull is an American computer scientist and animator who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been recognized for his contributions to 3-D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award. In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: a one-minute animated version of his left hand, titled A Computer Animated Hand, created with Fred Parke at the University of Utah. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, which had been described eight months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis. In that position, in 1977, he invented Tween, software for 2D animation that automatically produced frames of motion in between two frames.
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