The 2019 Turing Award, one of the highest honors in computing, was today awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, founding members of Pixar who helped shape the future of computer graphics. From a report: The two will share a $1M prize and, of course, the satisfaction of receiving this prestigious award for doing something they clearly love. The award has recently been given to such luminaries as Tim Berners-Lee, cryptographer Martin Hellman, and last year AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun. Catmull was at Pixar for more than 30 years, appointed its president from the very beginning as a LucasFilm animation studio bought and repurposed by Steve Jobs. Hanrahan was an early hire, and between them the two would have had enormous effects on the world of CG, even if they hadn’t built the poster child for the technology. TechCrunch spoke with Catmull and Hanrahan about the origins of the field and their early work in it that the Association for Computing Machinery chose to recognize this year. “When I started out, graphics didn’t really exist,” Hanrahan recalled. “I sort of discovered graphics in grad school, but there were no professors, no classes, it wasn’t even in the computer sciences, really.”

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Source: Slashdot – Pixar CG Pioneers Pat Hanrahan and Edwin Catmull Share M Turing Award