Henri Gouraud (computer scientist)

Henri Gouraud (* 1944 ) is a French computer scientist and pioneer of computer graphics , the inventor of Gouraud shading .

Gouraud, who comes from a military family, attended the Prytanée national militaire military school in La Flèche and studied at the École Centrale Paris from 1964 to 1967 (with a degree in engineering), specializing in computer science at the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (Supaero) and from 1968 worked with David Evans and Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah , where he received his doctorate in 1971 ( Computer display of curved surfaces ). In his dissertation he developed Gouraud Shading, which he demonstrated with photos of his wife Sylvie. After his doctorate, he returned to France to do his military service, which he served in a research group of the French Air Force. He then spent 10 years in the IT consulting firm Tecsi, a subsidiary of CIT-Alcatel, founded by some of his former professors at Supaero. For a short time from 1982 he was at the Center Mondial de l'Informatique , which was headed by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber , and in 1983 he founded the computer graphics software company Tangram with his former fellow student Patrick Baudelaire and others, which was taken over by DEC in 1986 . Gouraud continued to work at DEC after the takeover under the direction of Research Director Robert Taylor. After the acquisition of DEC by Compaq , he left the company and became director of Sun Microsystems' European research center in Grenoble , which closed in 2004. He then worked for the French Internet software company Exalead, among others .

In 1996 he became a Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite .

He is the great-nephew of the French general Henri Gouraud .

Fonts

• Continuous shading of curved surfaces , IEEE Transactions on Computers, C-20, 1971, No. 6, pp. 623-629
• Continuous shading of curved surfaces in Rosalee Wolfe (Ed.) Seminal Graphics: Pioneering efforts that shaped the field , ACM Press, 1998

Web links

• French biography of Patrick Callet, Bulletin de l'AFIG, No. 8, 1998