Edwin Catmull

Edwin Catmull's 1974 University of Utah thesis on displaying curved surfaces Catmull's thesis rendered smooth curved patches by splitting them again and again until each piece covered a single pixel, and it showed photographs being mapped onto those patches. That second idea is texture mapping: instead of modeling every scratch and label, wrap an image around the surface, a trick that games and films still lean on constantly. Catmull is also credited with depth buffering, storing the distance of the nearest surface at each pixel so hidden surfaces sort themselves out. Wolfgang Strasser described the same z-buffer idea independently a few months earlier, a reminder that good ideas often arrive in pairs.