The Vietnamese Computer Scientist Who Made Toy Story Possible
time.com
time.com
Thats awesome that, even after having zero to do with design or 3d modeling, 20+ years later the name stands out to me.
Hold up. This seems forced.
What would've driven this fellow to household recognition? Even his billionaire, surviving peer, Ed Catmull, and the commercial face of Pixar isn't a household name.
I don't think there's any reason to think Bùi's obscurity is due to any particular prejudice against Asian Americans.
This is indeed a bit forced.
I had heard of Bui Tuong Phong, Henri Gouraud, Ivan Sutherland, John Carmack, John Warnock, Martin Newell, and Nelson Max.
I hadn't heard of Arthur Appel, Dave Evans, David Immel, David Pearson, Edwin Catmull, Elizabeth Waldram, Frank Sinden, Fred Parke, James Clark, James Kajiya, Jim Blinn, Ken Knowlton, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Noll, Ralph Baer, Steve Russell, Tom Stockham, Verne Hudson, William Fetter, or William Higinbotham.
I haven't studied computer graphics, other than doing the Raytracing in One Weekend project.
(Oops, I missed people with accented, abbreviated, or uncapitalized names, like Pierre Bézier, David C. Evans, and Paul de Casteljau. I don't think this will change the ratio much, though.)
People don't know his life story just because he was the first to interpolate normals between the vertices of triangles for smooth shading and created an exponential falloff for a highlight.
If he didn't do that first, someone else would have done it pretty quickly after, but in the 70s 3D computer graphics was so niche there were only a few people in the world with access to enough memory to hold a single color image.
Also the title saying he made toy story possible is ridiculous clickbait. He had nothing to do with toy story and it came many years after his work.
Not only that toy story was done with renderman and curved patches that were broken down into pixel sized polygons with highlights that were probably similar to blinn, so it's actually an example of phong interpolation and shading not being used.
This is overall terrible journalism that makes distant connections to pop culture for clickbait.
Is it possible he was heavily exposed during the two years when that would have been possible? Many things are possible, of course. Is there any evidence whatsoever? I've been unable to find any citations to that effect. Certainly the author didn't bother.
I mean, it’s not a smoking gun, but does that really matter?
Parent isn't even being charitable.
Author qualified the linkage as unproven:
> It is impossible to ignore the possibility that these chemicals contributed to his early death.
R.I.P. Bùi Tường Phong.
> 3 out of 4 million people affected in vietnam
Are there only 4 million total people? Were 4 million affected and 3 million a subset of effect? Are they trying to say 3 in 4?
> This also suggests that “Phong shading” is a misnomer, but for reasons that will likely remain unknown, Bùi did not contest the naming. While he may not have coined the eponym himself, he referenced it in his dissertation and final publication.
I'm nowhere near as smart but if something's going to be named after me, as a Vietnamese, please please please use my given name. Either given name or given name + middle name or full name. Considering he also used it himself, he was probably more ok about it than the author thinks.
I understand it's the custom in English speaking academia to use family name and I only want to speak for myself, not for all Vietnamese and especially someone from 50 years ago. I also have the most common family name so the sentiments of someone with a less common one might be different.
Funnily enough, on his Wikipedia page, they also note about this:
> In this Vietnamese name, the surname is Bui. In accordance with Vietnamese custom, this person should be referred to by the given name, Phong.
Probably a better stance. It was kind of a reach by the the Time's article's author.
I assume, and please correct me if I misrepresent your reason, that you're referring to the fact that most Vietnamese have last names from a very small pool?
For those unaware: The 10 most common last names in Vietnam makes up 85% of the population, and nearly half Nguyen alone. I looked it up and Bùi is far less common, but still represents 11% of the population...
For comparison, only .7% of the US population is named Smith.
So in terms of naming something so you get recognition, in Vietnam Bùi is about 16 times worse than Smith would be in the US... Of course, internationally it might have made relatively little difference.
(and if it's not on the list of falsehoods programmers might believe about names - I haven't checked - Vietnamese is one good reason why if anyone think sharding users by last name is a good idea, thinking names like Smith is the worst case, depending on their demographics they may be wildly wrong)
Family names usually come up when referring to the whole family branch of 9-10+ generations like the Nguyễn family or the Bùi family. Because there are few family names, you often see family branches use family name+middle name of the first ancestor to be more specific.
23. Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
Most Vietnamese would prefer to be called by their given name, there is no implication of a relationship like "on a first-name basis".