The 2019 Turing Award was awarded to Pat Hanrahan and Ed Catmull, the legendary founding members of Pixar. The two talents will share a $1M prize.
The award has also been recently given to Tim Berners-Lee, Martin Hellman, AI gurus Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun.
Catmull spent more than 30 years at the studio, becoming the studio's president from the very beginning, and Hanrahan has also joined the studio a long time ago.
“When I started out, graphics didn’t really exist,” Hanrahan noted. “I sort of discovered graphics in grad school, but there were no professors, no classes, it wasn’t even in the computer sciences, really.”
“CG wasn’t thought of as being at the same level as new architectures and languages,” added Catmull. “But we believed that it was going to fundamental tool going forward; it just took a long time to get here.”
You can learn more in an article by TechCrunch here.
