Ivan Edward Sutherland is widely regarded as the father of computer graphics. As a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1960s, working at Lincoln Laboratory on the TX-2 computer, he created Sketchpad, an interactive drawing system that let a user manipulate graphical objects on a screen with a light pen. His 1963 thesis describing it, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System,” is one of the most influential documents in the history of computing and is preserved as Cambridge University Computer Laboratory technical report UCAM-CL-TR-574.
Sketchpad introduced ideas that pervade modern software: direct manipulation of objects on a display, a constraint solver that let the user state geometric relationships and have the system enforce them, a hierarchical structure in which a master drawing could be instanced many times, and recursive procedures for geometric transformation. These notions prefigured object-oriented programming, the graphical user interface, and computer-aided design, and they shaped the work of researchers such as Alan Kay and Douglas Engelbart.
After MIT, Sutherland’s career ranged across the field. He briefly led the information processing office at ARPA, succeeding J.C.R. Licklider, then taught at Harvard and the University of Utah, where with his student Bob Sproull he built an early head-mounted display, a foundational step toward virtual and augmented reality. In 1968 he co-founded Evans and Sutherland with David Evans to build high-performance graphics and flight-simulation systems. He later turned to integrated-circuit design and asynchronous logic, helping establish the academic study of VLSI.
In 1988 the Association for Computing Machinery awarded Sutherland the A.M. Turing Award, computing’s highest honor, “for his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after.” The breadth of his influence, from the first interactive graphics system to virtual reality and chip design, is reflected in the many students and collaborators who went on to define the field.