- Tom Duff
Thomas Douglas Selkirk Duff (b.
December 8 ,1952 , named for his putative ancestor, the fifth Earl of Selkirk) is acomputer programmer . He was born inToronto ,Ontario ,Canada and grew up in Toronto and Leaside. In 1974 he graduated from theUniversity of Waterloo with aB.Math and, two years later, got an M.Sc. from theUniversity of Toronto .Career
Duff worked at the
New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab and theMark Williams Company inChicago before moving toLucasfilm 's Computer Research and Development Division. He andThomas Porter , another Lucasfilm employee, developed a new approach to compositing images; their 1984 paper, "Compositing Digital Images", [Thomas Porter and Tom Duff, Compositing Digital Images, "Computer Graphics", 18(3), July 1984, 253-259. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/800031.808606 DOI:10.1145/800031.808606] .
(Available at [http://graphics.pixar.com/Compositing/ pixar.com.] )] is " [t] he seminal work on an algebra for image compositing", according toKeith Packard . [ [http://keithp.com/~keithp/porterduff/ Keith Packard's webpage] about Porter & Duff's 1984 paper] and "Porter-Duff compositing" is now a key technique in computer graphics. (See, for example,XRender and Glitz.)Duff later worked at
Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center, where he authored the well known "rc" shell for the (Unix-like) Plan 9 operating system.Duff has worked at Pixar Animation Studios since 1996.
Achievements
* In 1995 he was awarded (with others) the
Academy Scientific and Engineering Award for his work on digital image compositing. With Bill Reeves he designed the first version of Pixar's Marionette 3-D animation system, which won the same award in 1997.* While working at Lucasfilm, he created
Duff's device , a loop-unrolling mechanism in C.* On August 22, 2006, the
United States Patent and Trademark Office issued US patent|7095409 toPixar for a "Shot shading method and apparatus" invented by Tom Duff andRobert L. Cook *On October 31, 2006, the
United States Patent and Trademark Office issued US patent|7129940 toPixar for a "Shot rendering method and apparatus" invented by Tom Duff andRobert L. Cook Quotes
* "Shared libraries are the work of the devil, the one true sign that the apocalypse is at hand." [http://9fans.net/archive/2000/06/529]
* "Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help." [http://www.wing.rug.nl/info/programs/bash/article.html#6]Miscellaneous
* Tom Duff makes a
cameo appearance in the Niven/Pournelle science fiction novel "Footfall " as a co-discoverer of the invading spaceship: "Chap named Tom Duff, a computer type, spotted it."See also
* Mothra - A web browser Tom Duff wrote for Plan 9.
References
External links
* [http://www.tomduff.com/about.html Tom Duff] (short cv on family web site)
* [http://www.iq0.com/ iq0] (personal web site)
* [http://plan9.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/rc.html rc - The Plan 9 Shell]
* [http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/2nd_edition/papers/panel/panel A Quick Introduction to the Plan 9 Panel Library, a GUI toolkit by Tom Duff]
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