he is 49 this year, considered as one of the most genius programmer on earth. There are professors still doing real work at 90+ year old(yes, the UT professor goodenough for Nobel prize), John has a long way ahead, best luck!
i've heard he was pretty good, i didn't realize he was this widely respected and admired. I remember him for that fast inverse square root hack but that's about it.
He's already a legend, and he's not even 50.
I think he got that from someone at SGI.
Or was the second person to independently come up with it.
Just out of curiosity, how do you define a genius programmer? (vs regular programmer).
How about “wrote the Doom engine, then the Quake engine”. Good start?
He ushered in modern gaming, and everything he did in that domain was way ahead of the curve.