Martin Edward Newell is a British-born

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

specializing in

computer graphics Computer graphics deals with generating images with the aid of computers. Today, computer graphics is a core technology in digital photography, film, video games, cell phone and computer displays, and many specialized applications. A great deal ...

who is perhaps best known as the creator of the

Utah teapot The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid ...

computer model.

Career

Before emigrating to the US, he worked at what was then the Computer-Aided Design Centre ( CADCentre) in Cambridge, UK, along with his brother Dick Newell (who went on to co-found two of the most important UK graphics software companies – Cambridge Interactive Systems (CIS) in 1977 and

Smallworld Smallworld is the brand name of a portfolio of GIS software provided by GE Digital, a division of General Electric. The software was originally created by the Smallworld company founded in Cambridge, England, in 1989 by Dick Newell and others ...

in 1987). At CADCentre, the two Newells and Tom Sancha developed Newell's algorithm, a technique for eliminating cyclic dependencies when ordering polygons to be drawn by a computer graphics system. Utah teapot simple 2

Newell developed the

while working on a Ph.D. at the

University of Utah The University of Utah (U of U, UofU, or simply The U) is a public research university in Salt Lake City, Utah. It is the flagship institution of the Utah System of Higher Education. The university was established in 1850 as the University of D ...

, where he also helped develop a version of the

painter's algorithm The painter’s algorithm (also depth-sort algorithm and priority fill) is an algorithm for visible surface determination in 3D computer graphics that works on a polygon-by-polygon basis rather than a pixel-by-pixel, row by row, or area by are ...

for rendering. He graduated in 1975, and was on the Utah faculty from 1977 to 1979.History of the University of Utah School of Computing
retrieved 2010-01-26. Later he worked at

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xer ...

, where he worked on JaM, a predecessor of

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, ...

. JaM stood for "John and Martin" – the John was

John Warnock John Edward Warnock (born October 6, 1940) is an American computer scientist and businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke. Warnock was President of Adobe f ...

, co-founder of Adobe Systems.Adobe Co-founder John Warnock on the Competitive Advantages of Aesthetics and the 'Right' Technology
''Knowledge@Wharton'',

The Wharton School The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania ( ; also known as Wharton Business School, the Wharton School, Penn Wharton, and Wharton) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in ...

, 20 January 2010. He founded the computer-aided design software company

Ashlar Ashlar () is finely dressed (cut, worked) stone, either an individual stone that has been worked until squared, or a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, generally rectangular cuboid, mentioned by Vitr ...

in 1988. In 2007, Newell was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

for contributions to computer-graphics modeling, rendering, and printing.Dr. Martin E. Newell
in the NAE Members Directory, retrieved 2014-06-27. He recently retired as an Adobe Fellow at Adobe Systems.

References

Living people University of Utah alumni University of Utah faculty British emigrants to the United States British computer scientists British technology company founders American computer scientists Computer graphics researchers Year of birth missing (living people) Scientists at PARC (company) {{compu-scientist-stub