Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award | Hacker News Reader

Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan Win Turing Award

nytimes.com

424 pointsoscarwao82 comments

Pat Hanrahan is a friend and colleague at Stanford. For years, he occupied the office next door in the Gates Building. He's smart and insightful, gracious, thoughtful, well spoken, and open--social virtues which amplify intellectual skills. While the Turing Award cites his work in computer graphics, he has made significant contributions is other areas.

Nice to see computer graphics pioneers being recognized. Reading Ed Catmull's name always brings fond memories of learning mesh processing techniques they first thought of, like the Catmull-Clark subdivision (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catmull%E2%80%93Clark_subdivis...). Elegant stuff.

I think the later development of mixed triangle/quad subdivision by Warren and Schaefer is even more elegant, besides being more general: http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/schaefer/research/tutorial.pdf

Ah, the Stanford bunny. It's been a decade since I last worked with it in grad school, but I can't help feeling fond for the little guy. We spent hours and hours of frustration together.

Pat Hanrahan and I were CS grad students at the University of Wisconsin Madison at the same time. In addition to being brilliant, Pat was kind, egoless, and infectiously happy. He was just a fun person to be around. I haven't seen Pat since grad school days, but I'm sure it's as true now as it was then!

Amusing side note: Brian Paul, who wrote the mesa open source implementation of OpenGL, was a Wisconsin grad student at the same time! He was in the meteorology department, in the building across the street from computer science.

> In the early 1970s, Dr. Catmull was a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah under one of the founding fathers of computer graphics, Ivan Sutherland.

Off topic - I had an opportunity to meet and spend time with Ivan Sutherland, also a Turing award winner [0]. Ivan was one of the most "fun" scientists I have met and spoken with. His conversations were full with humor and humility.

I was walking past the street where Ivan (he insisted to call me that) was having a coffee. He asked me if I'd like to join him for one - pleasantly surprised, I said yes. The next 45m was Ivan telling me about a research problem he was working on and asking "tips" on how I would solve it. Initially, I was hesitant but he insisted and took me along a journey inside his wonderful mind.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Sutherland

Back when I was a wee young graphics programmer I taught myself to use Catmull-Rom splines to interpolate between camera positions (among many other things) for some stuff I was doing. Great to see one of the inventors getting recognition of all the cool stuff he's done!

I thought for years they were invented by three people, Cat, Mull and Rom.

Hence why we should always all be using CamelCase

I think I might have wondered who Cat Mullrom is and whether her mother insists on calling her Catherine...

Hanrahan absolute beast of a mind. Work at Stanford, RSL, and tableau. Absolutely deserves it. Catmull escaped prison I guess? Great work though.

lol. I came here to type “Hanrahan is a beast.” He has been involved with so much impressive work for so many years. I don’t know how he does it.

I recommend Ed Catmull’s book Creativity Inc about the founding of Pixar.

Recently read it. The first part of how Pixar came to be was really really interesting. From his days in research to Lucas Arts/Film to Jobs. The rest was also a good read. I also recommend it.

edit: and then a couple posts later I read, of course, things are never as they seem. Depressing.

What I got from the book is how much luck was involved (which Mr. Catmull acknowledges). If Lucas had not sold them. If Lucas had sold them to someone other than Steve Jobs. If Steve Jobs had not been willing to blow 70 million on them as a computer company. If Steve Jobs had not allowed them to pivot to animation after blowing 70 million on them as a computer company. If any one of those things had not happened Pixar would likely not exist and Mr. Catmull would likely just be another employee of some other company.

Same for me... I just have finished the book and found it very very inspiring until I saw the posts here.

Great book. If the history lessons don't get you, the leadership/management insights will. It should be required reading for anyone with aspiration in tech / creative fields.

I kind of wish ACM had mentioned the names of Pat Hanrahan's grad student(s) who worked on Brook, the predecessor of Nvidia's CUDA.

Though they did mention Marc Levoy, his Stanford colleague and coauthor on the light field paper.

I recently implemented Levoy & Hanrahan in a game engine—a genuinely great read and easy to digest. One of my favorite papers in CG/Comp Photo.

Pat Hanrahan is a wonderful soul. I talked to him after a talk he gave and he was super nice and not judgmental.

I don't have the same opinion about Ed Catmull. His wage fixing really saddened me. To remove agency from peoples lives for profit of Pixar is an unconscionable act. He curtailed lives for his own gain.

https://archive.md/mAhJd

Having worked at Pixar, I think Catmull's wage-fixing involvement should absolutely disqualify him from receiving the Turing Award.

And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing. Z-buffering is obvious. Those were the days of low hanging fruit in graphics.

> And really, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces aren't that amazing.

And the fact that Catmull-Clark is based on recursive refinement makes it really bad for GPU evaluation (or parallel evaluation in general). It's completely incompatible with hardware tessellation, for example.

If I had to pick an especially non-obvious, elegant, and useful 1980s graphics technique, Pineda rasterization would come to mind.

Subdivision surfaces aren't so bad on the GPU. Since each limit vertex is a linear combination of control vertices, you can precompute the stencils to evaluate limit vertices. Those stencils can all be evaluated in parallel in a compute kernel. Generally, the base mesh topology isn't changing in an animation, so this works fairly well.

For Catmull-Clark, the regular parts of the mesh (quads with valence 4 vertices) are just b-splines and thus can be evaluated using the hardware tessellator.

I had the good fortune of taking Hanrahan's introductory computer graphics class at Stanford several years ago.

He's a great teacher and the class was a lot of fun. Seemed like a genuinely nice guy as well. Congratulations!

IMHO Pat deserves another Turing Award for creating Tableau.

For those troubled by the paywall: it doesn't appear if you disable javascript. I used my uBlock origin to do so.

Has Catmull changed his opinion on his participation in illegally colluding with Google, Apple, etc to keep employee wages low? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-goo...

For extremely high values of "low"...

Collusion is collusion. By keeping salaries lower at the tech giants, they kept salaries lower in the whole tech industry.

Huh? Wages in SF bay skyrocketed in the years after the wage fixing scheme got busted. I'm not sure what you're on about.

That's just... your opinion. The wage gap between CEO and leaf in the tech industry is not better than Walmart.

Can we link to the ACM award site and its article instead of the NYT paywall?

https://amturing.acm.org/

The NYT article has some additional context, including quotes from interviews. Generally we prefer an article like that to press releases (especially corporate ones), unless it's unusually interesting.

Paywalls suck, of course, but HN's rule is that it's ok as long as there's a workaround. Users usually post workarounds in the threads, including in this thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Cool, maybe Ed could split his part between all the workers he exploited.

I didn't know about this so I looked it up:

> The plaintiffs in the lawsuit presented substantial evidence that implicated Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios president Ed Catmull as a ringleader of the illegal wage-fixing scheme. The Walt Disney Company has done nothing to reprimand or punish Catmull for his questionable actions, and he continues to serve as the leader for both Disney and Pixar animation studios.

https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/animation-workers-...

Pretty damning if true. Anyone got a better/additional source?

Doesn't mention Catmull specifically but here are the DOJ settlements:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-l...

Disney has a long history of exploiting their workers financially, conversely the workers have a long history of loving working for Disney. It's a strange symbiotic relationship.

Sounds a lot like Apple, that other Steve Jobs company.

Working at one's "dream job" is an easy way to be taken advantage of, sadly.

indeed, I know one guy in particular that really stands out for me - he's working as an editor and hasn't been paid in years, they keep saying 'they're getting investors' then they'll pay him, his parents are giving him money. One of the many reasons I'm not in the vfx industry - how do you compete with people that are willing to work for free.

It almost makes one question the definition of "exploitation."

"Hey, your employer is extracting far more value from you than they're paying you for. You should be paid more."

"Yes, but I don't really need to be."

Is that "exploitation?"

But where else would they get paid for their work? They can't leave to "The other blockbuster animation studio" because there is only a handful, and they've all agreed to fix wages at a certain rate so they don't get into a wage-war. If demand for their talent drove their wages, their wages would be much higher. Small studios don't make enough money to pay higher, so big studios hold all the cards and exploit that fact to draw down wages.

It's the same issue airline pilots have. If they had the choice to move to a different airline paying higher, they would, but they accept the conditions they're given because the whole industry pays similar rates, and their skills aren't transferable to any other industry. Essentially they're trapped, lest they choose an entirely new career.

Right. The answer in the large is "They'd decide animation is a sucker's game and do something else entirely." Which they could do, and that's the natural back-pressure on wage-fixing cartels driving prices to zero (as opposed to the "unnatural" back-pressure of laws that say "companies aren't allowed to collude on fixing wages", which almost universally translates to "... in ways we can see," because every major industry with a few players and a non-union staff does it somehow. To be clear, I think those laws are wise, but they're a sub-optimal solution because they're very easily gamed and the ROI for gaming them is very, very high).

There were not many Google engineers who felt actually slighted by Google when the company was fined for price-fixing along with Apple, Pixar, eBay, &c. At least, if they did feel slighted, they sure didn't demonstrate their frustration by unionizing, leaving, or actually taking more action than accepting their one-time payoff from the class-action settlement. And why would they? They're already paid far above average wages for employees countries Google operates in (and significantly above most of the tech sector in the US).

In the case of the Google wage-fixing cartel, it was partially broken even before the lawsuit by Facebook, which was not part of the cartel and hired away enough Google engineers that Google had to raise wages for the entire company in 2011.

That's why airline pilots form unions to defend their interests.

Which is also what has happened in large swathes of the animation industry (though, importantly, not Pixar).

Yes, someone doesn't have to know, understand, or feel that they're being exploited for it to be exploitation.

That implies exploitation is not defined in the transaction between the individuals directly affected, but via a third party acting as a higher power.

I agree, but it "smells" weird that we've included "feel" in that set in this specific context. If neither party feels they're exploiting or being exploited in an employment agreement paying well above minimum wage, then by what standard is a third party judging their transaction that we can conclude they "feel" wrongly?

We start to go down a pretty dark path when we take "mutual consent" off the table as the gold standard for two-party interactions. There are absolutely criteria of things in society for which we do that, but we hold them to a very high standard of scrutiny, and I'm not convinced "That employer is underpaying their employee with too low a six-figure salary" meets that high standard of scrutiny.

Given the parameters as you laid it out there, I'd say "no" or at least "not necessarily" because not all value is monetary.

That is, the value you get from your job may be more than just your paycheck. This won't necessarily apply to everybody, but I'm pretty sure some people receive value simply from the work itself and the sense of accomplishment they get from doing what they do.

It's called Stockholm Syndrome.

What's really funny is that this guy had the balls to publish a book named "Creativity inc." which talked about the "culture of candor", the egalitarian culture of Pixar... much of this talk was later challenged by numerous women who opened up about the sexism and misogyny they'd faced there. And of course the other guy that founded Pixar, John Lasseter, turned out to be a molester and so was laid off. Great company!

The two things need not be exclusive: you can have a company that is egalitarian and candid in matters related to the actual creative work and definitely superior to other companies at the time, and still have issues at the interpersonal level. I can think a person is unlikeable and stay as away as possible from them, and then have a productive conversation with them in an open meeting that advances the company output. Even the Beatles didn't like each other that much, and I'm sure the production of Casablanca was plagued by "couches", but they still made masterpieces that were superior to anything seen before.

Well, they don't need to be exclusive as long as you're in the group that's not being excluded or treated badly. If you are, then you don't have the luxury of ignoring it and separating those issues so cleanly.

I agree, but those groups have always had that problem, and progress on that front is orthogonal to other issues.

I very much doubt that he wrote most of that book.

Of all the people in Hollywood who we've found out are creeps, Lasseter is the most depressing. He seemed like such a wholesome guy.

I was at Pixar 2006-2011. On several occasions, I would see Lasseter hugging various people in his entourage. Hugs so long, I initially wondered if someone had died. It was a bit strange. At a company meeting, in front of the entire staff, he made a comment about how attractive the women at some film festival were. I looked around at people standing next to me thinking I just had misheard. Nobody seemed particularly phased.

So the creepyness was apparent even to this lowly software engineer. Of course it was the tip of the iceberg with Lasseter.

There was this other guy who was an art director or something like that, and we used to call him a walking HR violation. Once he cornered me in the locker room and told me how all his friends are out of shape and have lousy sex. I shrugged it off as just one of the eccentric characters you encounter at the cartoon factory. He was extremely macho, and a fan of Putin, which actually made him somewhat interesting to me politically, though I disagreed with him about practically everything. Then came the 2016 election and his sexism got way out of hand and I couldn't stand him any more. I found it strange that someone with two daughters would be such a misogynist.

Turns out he had been saying creepy things to one of the same women that HR was trying to keep away from Lasseter, limiting her career. She wrote an article about her whole experience: https://byrslf.co/pixars-sexist-boys-club-9d621567fdc9

Some previous discussions on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8023005

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12257152

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-11-19/apple-goo...

"“Like somehow we’re hurting some employees? We’re not,” Catmull said. “While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also,” Catmull said. “I don’t apologize for this."

As someone that once ran a company I could have easily and without malice been accused of something like wage fixing had I not had a partner more wise than me. Recruiter called, told me he wanted to recruit my employees. I asked my partner. My partner said it was up to the employee to decide, not us.

My gut would have been different. I would have considered that losing some of those employees could have killed the company and then all the other employees would be out of a job. I don't know that's the decision I would have made but the thought would have crossed my mind and it's possible I'd have made the wrong decision not knowing it was illegal.

The point I'm trying to make is it's possible Mr. Cathmull had no malicious intent and thought he was doing the right thing at the time to protect a 400 person company. If true that doesn't excuse the actual crime but it does mean he might not be the monster he's being painted to be here.

Half of HN seems to worship Steve Jobs who was also caught wage fixing. No excuse for him either.

You're missing important details. The wage fixing scheme lasted well into my time at Pixar, in which the company was over a thousand people (I received money in the settlement). Multiple executives at different companies were involved. It seems unlikely that an executive would not either know about the law, or have counsel advising on it. Let alone multiple executives at different companies.

After all, in your case, it took just two people, presumably neither lawyers, to know what not to do.

Pixar was paying software people significantly less than other companies. And they would try low-balling you, which sadly many of my colleagues fell for, all starry eyed about making movies, for whatever reason. That's just par for the course I suppose, but the wage fixing on top of that was a bit gross.

I can buy this argument for a new leader of a small company, but at the time these things took place, Ed was a senior leader at a very high level for ~ten years. Also, at the time that the lawsuit covers, it was definitely not 400, but probably closer to a thousand employees, and more importantly for at least most of that period Pixar was a wholly owned component of one of the largest entertainment companies in the world (Disney). So Ed either should have known, or he shouldn't have been in a position to make those kinds of decisions. Furthermore, at the time of the lawsuit, this was not some small mom-and-pop shop trying to eke out an honest living, but was the most successful animation studio in the world for a decade, whose films were producing hundreds of millions in profits every twelve to eighteen months, so it's not like they were in some tight pinch and couldn't afford to compete on wages, they just didn't want to. As one of the principle people behind Pixar, Ed also benefited enormously from the studio's success, so to see him trying to suppress the wages of others is disappointing. In light of all this, the "oopsie, didn't mean to" line doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

With that said, he's done a lot of cool things, and deserves recognition and credit for a lot of important pieces of technology. This award is deserved.

For reference, I was involved in the class-action lawsuit as an employee of one of the other studios involved in the price fixing ring.

Not to sound too harsh, but it's only "without malice" when you tell it like that. It's also the story of a company that couldn't survive paying market wages, and so colluded to rob employees of a fair wage. The owners and managers benefited, the workers did not.

Does that mean we can conclusively say they are human?

That's the Turing Test. This is the Turing Award - it's an academic achievement award. They're just named after the same person - they're not related otherwise.

I think the OP knows this already.

It's most likely a cheeky dig.

You just failed both! :).

The Turing Award isn't a test - you can't fail it any more than you fail to win a Nobel Prize.

Obviously have never had Asian parents

It's a prize Turing got for inventing a machine that lets you compute anything using only toilet paper.

No, we can say they're human or an artificial general intelligence.

Catmull reminds me of Fritz Haber [1] in that he both invented amazingly useful tech. while being an absolutely horrible human being.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

Are you comparing chemical-warfare to wage-fixing?

Probably the systematic sexual harassment he enabled at Pixar is the thing being compared to.

Dude’s a shithead in more ways than one.

Fritz Haber is such a tragic character. Saved the world from hunger by inventing the process for ammonium fertilizer, helped to kill thousands by being a central figure in building up German chemical weapons for WWI, tried to extract gold from seawater to pay Germany's WWI debt but of course failed. He was a huge patriot, but being a Jew, he had to go on exile to England, where he died.

A nod to the graciousness of England, not just for accepting him as a refugee, but for those former military enemies and chemical warfare competitors, who actively helped him by offering a position at Cambridge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber#Death

So now, Disney also wins Turing Award. Can't wait for anything that's not an excuse for showing ads to earn recognition.

Disney didn't win anything. Catmull and Hanrahan have had an incredibly large impact on computer graphics.

Of course.

Sometimes you don't sleep enough, write stupid comments, and wonder why HN does not always show a 'delete' button.

Fair enough!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com