Steven Anson Coons

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Steven Anson Coons (born March 7, 1912 in New York City , † August 1979 ) was an American computer scientist, engineer and pioneer of computer graphics and computer aided design (CAD). He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

biography

Coons studied at MIT from 1932 to 1936, which he left to work as a photographer, and worked for the Chance Vought Aircraft Company during World War II. There he developed the Coons surface ( Coons patch ) for design purposes, a curved surface element for design of aircraft. Later he was a professor in the mechanical engineering department at MIT. His students there included Ivan Sutherland (who developed the CAD idea in his sketchpad for his dissertation at MIT in 1963) and Lawrence Roberts . In 1961/62 he developed the idea of ​​an interactive computer graphic design ( Computer Aided Design , CAD), and published about it in 1963. He worked out the idea of ​​his surface elements in the 1960s at MIT in the Electronic Systems Laboratory and in 1967 published a pioneering work called Little Red Book (Surfaces for Computer Aided Design of Space Forms).

He used computer graphics in the auto industry as a consultant to Ford in Detroit.

The ACM awards in odd years a Steven Coons Award for outstanding creative contributions to computer graphics.

Fonts

  • with Robert Mann: Computer-Aided Design Related to the Engineering Design Process, MIT 1960
  • An outline of the requirements for a computer-aided design system, Joint Computer Conference 1963
  • Surfaces for Computer Aided Design, Technical Report, MIT 1964
  • The uses of computers in technology, Scientific American, Volume 215, 1966, No. 3
  • Design and the Computer, Design Quarterly, No. 66/67, 1966, pp. 6-13
  • Surfaces for Computer Aided Design of Space Forms, MIT Project Mac, Technical Report TR-41, June 1967 (The Little Red Book)
    • French translation by P. Bézier, M. Moronval: Méthode matricielle, Paris: Herman 1987
  • Applications of electronic computing systems in technology, in: Information, computers and artificial intelligence: 12 American scientists show the future influence of computers on human society, Frankfurt am Main, Umschau-Verlag 1967, pp. 133-144
  • Rational bicubic surface patches, Technical Report, Project Mac, MIT 1968
  • Surfaces patches and B-spline curves, in: R. Barnhill, R. Riesenfeld (Eds.), Computer Aided Geometric Design, Academic Press 1974, pp. 1-16

literature

  • Daniel Cardoso Llach: Builders of the vision. Software and the imagination of design, Routledge 2015
  • Jon Peddie: The history of visual magic in computers, Springer 2013
  • B. Herzog: In Memoriam of Steven Anson Coons, Computer Graphics, Volume 13, February 1980, pp. 228-231.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Supervisors were Claude Shannon , Marvin Minsky, and Steven Coons
personal data
SURNAME Coons, Steven Anson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American computer scientist and engineer
DATE OF BIRTH March 7, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH August 1979