Edwin “Ed” Catmull is one of the founding figures of three-dimensional computer graphics. He earned his PhD from the University of Utah in 1974 with a dissertation titled “A Subdivision Algorithm for Computer Display of Curved Surfaces,” produced in the Utah computer graphics program that also trained many other pioneers of the field. In that thesis he introduced two ideas that became foundational: the z-buffer, which resolves which surface is visible at each pixel by storing a depth value per pixel, and texture mapping, which wraps a two-dimensional image onto a curved three-dimensional surface.
After Utah, Catmull led the computer graphics laboratory at the New York Institute of Technology, then moved to Lucasfilm to build its Computer Division, the group that would later be spun out as Pixar. In the Computer History Museum oral history he recorded as a 2013 CHM Fellow, Catmull traces this path from academic research through Lucasfilm to the founding of Pixar in 1986 with financing from Steve Jobs, and on to the production of the first fully computer-animated feature film.
In 1978, working with James Clark, Catmull published “Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes” in the journal Computer-Aided Design. The method it described, now known as Catmull-Clark subdivision, generalizes smooth B-spline surfaces to meshes of arbitrary topology by repeatedly refining a polygon mesh. It remains one of the most widely used techniques for representing smooth surfaces in modeling and animation.
As a co-founder and long-serving president of Pixar, Catmull combined research leadership with production leadership. He was a co-author of the 1987 SIGGRAPH paper on the Reyes image-rendering architecture that underpinned RenderMan, and he helped steer Pixar from a hardware and software company into a feature-film studio. He later became president of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios after Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Pixar.
In 2019 the Association for Computing Machinery named Catmull and Pat Hanrahan recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the field’s highest honor, for their fundamental contributions to three-dimensional computer graphics and the revolutionary impact of those techniques on computer-generated imagery in filmmaking. The ACM citation explicitly connects their work to the emergence of an entirely computer-animated genre of feature films beginning with Toy Story.
Catmull’s career is unusual in spanning pure algorithmic invention, industrial research management, and the creative direction of a major studio. The z-buffer he described in 1974 is now implemented in virtually every graphics processor, and Catmull-Clark surfaces are a default tool in modeling packages, making him one of the rare individuals whose academic ideas became both ubiquitous infrastructure and the basis of a new art form.