Sutherland, Ivan

Ivan Sutherland, in full Ivan Edward Sutherland, (born May 16, 1938, Hastings, Nebraska, U.S.), American electrical engineer and computer scientist and winner of the 1988 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science, for “his pioneering and visionary contributions to computer graphics, starting with Sketchpad, and continuing after.” Sutherland is often recognized as the father of computer graphics.

Sutherland earned a bachelor’s degree (1959) in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), a master’s degree (1960) in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and a doctorate (1963) in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His doctoral dissertation, “Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System,” under the direction of the information theory pioneer Claude Shannon, was the start of computer graphics, the graphical user interface (GUI), and computer-aided design (CAD) programs. See computer-aided engineering.

After leaving MIT, Sutherland was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army and served as an electrical engineer in the National Security Agency (1963) and then as a researcher at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (1964), where he initiated projects in time-sharing systems and artificial intelligence.

Following his discharge from the army, Sutherland held professorships at Harvard University (1965–68), the University of Utah (1968–76), and Caltech (1976–81). In 1968 Sutherland and David Evans, from Utah’s computer science department, established Evans and Sutherland, a company that did pioneering work in computer graphics and printer languages. While at Caltech, Sutherland also worked as a consultant for the RAND Corporation (1976–80). In 1980 Sutherland cofounded Sutherland, Sproull and Associates, which was acquired in 1990 by Sun Microsystems, Inc., an American computer manufacturer, and formed the core of the new Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where Sutherland served as a vice president. Sutherland was named a fellow at Sun in 2001.

In addition to the Turing Award, Sutherland received the first U.S. National Academy of Engineering Zworykin Award (1972), a Smithsonian Computer World Award (1996), and the Kyoto Prize (2012). He was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (1972) and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1978).