External Resources for Computer Graphics
William D. Shoaff with lots of help
These are some of the people who have created the field of computer graphics,
which can be dated from the early 1960's, but the
seeds were planted much earlier.
Some of the people who laid the groundwork for the development of computer
graphics are listed below. The biographical notes are from
http://www.biography.com.
- Euclid (circa 300 - 250 BC) Greek mathematician who taught in Alexandria
His chief extant work is the 13-volume Elements, which became the
most widely known mathematical book of Classical antiquity, and is still much used in
geometry. The approach which obeys his axioms became known as Euclidean geometry.
- Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 - 1446) architect, goldsmith, and sculptor,
born in Florence, Italy. One of the figures responsible for the
development of the Renaissance style in Florence, his chief work is
the dome of the cathedral there. Erected between 1420 and 1461,
it is (measured diametrically) the largest in the world,
and served as the model for Michelangelo's design for St Peter's in
Rome. Other well-known buildings by him in Florence are the Church of
San Lorenzo (1418-29) and the Ospedale degli
Innocenti (1419-44). He is also noted for his innovations in the use of perspective.
- Rene Descartés (Latin Renatius Cartesius) (1596-1650)
rationalist philosopher and mathematician, born in La Haye,
France. Trained at the Jesuit College at La Flèche, he remained a
Catholic throughout his life, but soon became dissatisfied
with scholasticism. While serving in the Bavarian army in 1619, he
conceived it to be his task to
refound human knowledge on a basis secure from scepticism. He
expounded the major features
of his project in his most famous work, the Meditationes de
prima philosophia (1641,
Meditations on First Philosophy). He began his enquiry by claiming
that one can doubt all one's
sense experiences, even the deliverances of reason, but that one
cannot doubt one's own
existence as a thinking being: cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore
I am'). From this basis he
argued that God must exist and cannot be a deceiver; therefore, his
beliefs based on ordinary
sense experience are correct. He also argued that mind and body are
distinct substances,
believing that this dualism made possible human freedom and
immortality. His Discours de la
méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la v´rité dans
les sciences (1637, Discourse on the Method for Rightly Conducting
One's Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences)
contained appendices in which he virtually founded co-ordinate or
analytic geometry, and
made major contributions to optics. In 1649 he moved to Stockholm to
teach Queen Christina of Sweden.
- Issac Newton (1642 - 1727) physicist and mathematician, born in
Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, EC England, UK. He studied at Cambridge. In
1665-6 the fall of an apple is said to have suggested the train of thought
that led to the law of gravitation. He studied the nature of light,
concluding that white light is a mixture of colours which can be separated by
refraction, and devised the first reflecting telescope. He became professor
of mathematics at Cambridge in 1669, where he resumed his work on
gravitation, expounded finally in his famous Philosophiae naturalis principia
mathematica (1687, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). In 1696 he
was appointed warden of the Mint, and was master of the Mint from 1699 until
his death. He also sat in parliament on two occasions, was elected President
of the Royal Society in 1703, and was knighted in 1705. During his life he
was involved in many controversies, notably with Leibniz over the question of
priority in the discovery of calculus.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646 - 1716) philosopher and mathematician,
born in Leipzig, Germany. He studied there and at Altdorf,
spent time in Paris and London, and in 1676 became librarian to the
Duke of Brunswick at Hanover. He also travelled in Austria and Italy,
and went in 1700 to persuade Frederick I of
Prussia to found the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, of which
he became the first president. A man of remarkable breadth of
knowledge, he made original contributions to optics,
mechanics, statistics, logic, and probability theory. He conceived
the idea of calculating machines, and of a universal language. He
wrote on history, law, and political theory, and his philosophy was the
foundation of 18th-c Rationalism. He was involved in a controversy with Isaac
Newton over whether he or Newton was the inventor of integral and
differential calculus; the Royal Society formally declared for Newton in
1711, but the matter was never really resolved. Unpopular with George of
Hanover, he was left behind in 1714 when the Elector moved his court to
London (as George I). He died in Hanover two years later, without real
recognition and with almost all his work unpublished.
- Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783) mathematician, born in Basel,
Switzerland. He studied mathematics there under Jean Bernoulli, and became
professor of physics (1731) and then of mathematics (1733) at the St
Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1738 he lost the sight of one eye. In 1741
he moved to Berlin as director of mathematics and physics in the Berlin
Academy, but returned to St Petersburg in 1766, soon afterwards losing the
sight of his other eye. He was a giant figure in 18th-c mathematics,
publishing over 800 different books and papers, on every aspect of pure and
applied mathematics, physics and astronomy. His Introductio in analysin
infinitorum (1748) and later treatises on differential and integral calculus
and algebra remained standard textbooks for a century and his notations, such
as e and ò have been used ever since. For the princess of Anhalt-Dessau he
wrote Lettres á une princesse d'Allemagne (1768-72), giving a clear
non-technical outline of the main physical theories of the time. He had a
prodigious memory, which enabled him to continue mathematical work and to
compute complex calculations in his head when he was totally blind. He is
without equal in the use of algorithms to solve problems.
- James Joseph Sylvester (1814 - 1897) mathematician, born in London. He
studied at Cambridge but, as a Jew, was disqualified from graduating. He
became professor at University College, London (1837), and the University of
Virginia (1841-5). Returning to London he worked as an actuary, and was
called to the bar in 1850. He then took up academic life again, becoming
professor of mathematics at Woolwich (1855-70), at Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore (1877-83), and at Oxford (1883-94). He made important
contributions to the theory of invariants and to number theory, and
he invented matrix notation.
- I. Schoenberg () discovered splines curves.
- J. (John) Presper Eckert (1919 - 1995) computer engineer, inventor;
born in Philadelphia. A University of Pennsylvania graduate in electronic
engineering, he and John W. Mauchly developed the first practical electronic
digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC)
(1942-46); it weighed several tons and used thousands of valves and
resistors. In 1951 an improved version of their computer, the UNIVAC I,
became one of the first commercially sold computers. Eckert had more than 85
patents for his various electronic inventions.
- John William Mauchly (1907 - 1980) physicist, computer inventor; born
in Cincinnati, Ohio. He taught for several years after graduating from Johns
Hopkins University, then joined John P. Eckert at the University of
Pennsylvania in the development of ENIAC, the first practical electronic
digital computer. Their improved version, UNIVAC I, was acquired for use by
the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951. These early Eckert-Mauchly machines helped
launch the computer revolution of the second half of the 20th century.
- Researchers at IBM and MIT developed the SAGE air
defense system thatused computers, light pens and cathode ray tubes (CRTs).
Here's a preliminary start to a list of sites for computer graphics.
If you have sites that you believe should be include, please mail
them to me.
Useful mathematics sites
Computer graphics programming began in chaos with every organization
developing their own library of graphics routines.
The routines were writeen in a particular language,
for particular system: computer, operating system, and display device.
The first widely used graphics application programming interface (API),
called the 3D Core Graphics System (the Core), was a developed in the mid-seventies
to fill the need for device-independent graphics.
It was produced by an
ACM
SIGGRAPH
committee in 1977 and refined in 1979.
The Core fulfilled a need, but it was never an official
(government sponsored
American National Standards Institute (ANSI)
and
International Standards Organization (ISO)) standard.
The first ANSI standard graphics API was the Graphical Kernal System (1985),
but it was for 2D graphics only.
In 1988, the GKS-3D package was released.
In comparison to the Core, GKS-3D was a very complex package, and this,
combined with the fact that it started life as a 2D standard limited
its useful life.
Also, by the time GKS-3D was released, an even more ambitious API,
the Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics Systems (PHIGS),
was released.
Both GKS and PHIGS support primitives such as lines, polygons, and character
strings, and their attributes (e.g., color, size).
GKS allows programmers to group these into segments that
were stored in a linear display list that routines in GKS would
traverse to display the scene.
PHIGS, as the name suggests, allowed these collections (now called structures instead of segments) into be nested (as trees).
This allowed for more efficient traversal and dynamic movement of the
primitives within a structure via
transformations:
scaling, rotations, and translations.
PHIGS was later extended to PHIGS+.
Other important software packages in the development of graphics
are Apple's QuickDraw, which is a integer raster graphics package,
and MIT's X Window System.
OpenGL is a modern graphics API that was developed from
Silicon Graphics'
GL (graphics library).
William Shoaff
2000-09-27