Jim Blinn

For over three decades, eminent computer graphicist Jim Blinn has coupled his scientific knowledge and artistic abilities to foster the growth of the computer graphics field. His many contributions include the Voyager flyby animations of space missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus; The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part telecourse of animated physics; and the computer animation of Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos. In addition, Blinn is the recipient of the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award as well as the SIGGRAPH Coons Award, and has developed many widely used graphics techniques, including bump mapping, environment mapping, and blobby modeling. In 2000, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He currently works at Microsoft Research.