Contents

Martin Newell (computer scientist)

Martin Edward Newell is a British-born computer scientist specializing in computer graphics who is perhaps best known as the creator of the Utah teapot computer model.

Career[edit]

Before emigrating to the US, he worked at what was then the Computer-Aided Design Centre (CADCentre) in Cambridge, UK,^[2] 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 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.^[3][4][5]

Newell developed the Utah teapot while working on a Ph.D. at the University of Utah,^[1][6] where he also helped develop a version of the painter's algorithm for rendering. He graduated in 1975, and was on the Utah faculty from 1977 to 1979.^[7] Later he worked at Xerox PARC, where he worked on JaM, a predecessor of PostScript. JaM stood for "John and Martin" – the John was John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe Systems.^[8]

Newell departed Xerox PARC to join CADLINC Inc.,^[9] a factory automation startup, as VP of Advanced Development. There he led the development of a variety of CAD/CAM software applications, such as CimCAD (a 3-D drafting program) ^[10] and Intelligent Documentation ^[11] (an early electronic document editor integrating text, graphics, and information from relational databases).

He departed CADLINC to found the computer-aided design software company Ashlar in 1988.^[7] In 2007, Newell was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer-graphics modeling, rendering, and printing.^[12] He recently retired as an Adobe Fellow at Adobe Systems.

References[edit]