Pete came to Utah after a bit of a relative graphics drought in the department, right when I was trying to absorb as much as I could. I literally glommed onto him, learned as much as I could about ray tracing, started working on his path tracer, and I can honestly say working with Pete changed my life. That’s a long story, but incidentally he named his path tracer “Eon” after how long it took to produce a decent image. He’d also arrived with a codebase that predated modern C++, we often used prefixes in class and variable names. His prefix was ‘gg’ which I don’t remember what it stands for, but the prefix was so common he broke the ‘g’ key off of his keyboard.

Yes. I was fortunate to take a class from him in 2005: Discrete Mathematics. A CS class, incidentally. He has a great personality. The thing that I remember the most is his emphasis on treating software development as an engineering discipline. It wasn't even related to the course subject matter, really, but as an introductory CS class, his working it in has strongly influenced my programming philosophy ever since.

The CS department at the University of Utah is part of the College of Engineering (and rightly so) but, sadly, as I've worked with CS grad after CS grad from there, this emphasis is clearly not shared by the rest of the faculty, nor is it prominent in the curriculum. The graduates are consistently good at theory and bad in practice.