Nelson Max is a distinguished professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1967, advised by Herman Gluck. His research interests include scientific visualization,

computer animation Computer animation is the process used for digitally generating animations. The more general term computer-generated imagery (CGI) encompasses both static scenes (still images) and dynamic images (moving images), while computer animation refe ...

, photorealistic computer graphics rendering, multi-view stereo reconstruction, and

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...

. In visualization he worked on

molecular graphics Molecular graphics is the discipline and philosophy of studying molecules and their properties through graphical representation. IUPAC limits the definition to representations on a "graphical display device". Ever since Dalton's atoms and Kekul� ...

, and volume and

flow Flow may refer to: Science and technology * Fluid flow, the motion of a gas or liquid * Flow (geomorphology), a type of mass wasting or slope movement in geomorphology * Flow (mathematics), a group action of the real numbers on a set * Flow (psych ...

visualization, particularly on irregular finite element meshes. He has rendered realistic lighting effects in clouds, trees, and water waves, and has produced numerous computer animations, shown at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conferences, and in OMNIMAX stereo at the Fujitsu Pavilions at Expo ’85 in Tsukuba Japan, and at Expo ’90 in Osaka Japan. He received the prestigious

Steven A. Coons Award ACM SIGGRAPH is the international Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques based in New York. It was founded in 1969 by Andy van Dam (its direct predecessor, ACM SICGRAPH was f ...

in 2007, and is a Fellow of the ACM and a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy. His computer animation in the early 1970s for the Topology Films Project included the award winning animated films "Space Filling Curves," showing continuous fractal curves that pass through every point in a square, and "Turning a Sphere Inside Out," showing how to turn a sphere inside out without tearing or creasing the surface, but allowing the surface to cross itself. In photorealistic rendering, he was the first to render beams of light and shadow from atmospheric scattering, and developed horizon mapping to render bump shadows on bump-mapped surfaces. At

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

in 1981, he produced the film "Carla's Island" showing reflections of the sunset on ocean waves, using vectorized ray tracing on the Cray 1 supercomputer.

References

Living people Computer graphics professionals Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Harvard University alumni University of California, Davis faculty Year of birth missing (living people) {{Compu-bio-stub