Edwin Catmull
Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist and animator who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been recognized for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
Also recorded as Edwin Earl Catmull · Edwin E. Catmull · Ed Catmull
Edwin Catmull

VES_Awards_89.jpg: Jeff Heusser derivative work: Ahonc · This file was derived from: VES Awards 89.jpg · CC BY 2.0
- Born
- 1945. · Parkersburg.
- Nationality
- United States.
- Occupation
- computer scientist, engineer, executive producer and film director.
- Fields
- computer graphics.
- Education
- University of Utah and Granite High School.
- Honours
- IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Academy Award of Merit, Computer History Museum Fellow, ACM Fellow, Turing Award and Gordon E. Sawyer Award.
- Languages
- English.
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Edwin Earl Catmull (born March 31, 1945) is an American computer scientist and animator who is the co-founder of Pixar and was the president of Walt Disney Animation Studios. He has been recognized for his contributions to 3D computer graphics, including the 2019 ACM Turing Award.
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wikidata · Q93161 · wikipedia · Edwin Catmull
In this article
Early life
Early life
Edwin Catmull studied at University of Utah and Granite High School. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is computer graphics. Employment is recorded with Applicon, New York Institute of Technology and Industrial Light & Magic. Distinctions recorded are IEEE John von Neumann Medal, Academy Award of Merit, Computer History Museum Fellow and ACM Fellow.
Edwin Catmull was born on March 31, 1945, in Parkersburg, West Virginia. His family later moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where his father first served as principal of Granite High School and then of Taylorsville High School. Early in his life, Catmull found inspiration in Disney movies, including Peter Pan and Pinocchio, and wanted to be an animator; however, after finishing high school, he had no idea how to get there as there were no animation schools around that time. Because he also liked math and physics, he chose a scientific career instead. He also made animation using flip-books. Catmull graduated in 1969, with a B.S. in physics and computer science from the University of Utah. Initially interested in designing programming languages, Catmull encountered Ivan Sutherland, who had designed the computer drawing program Sketchpad, and changed his interest to digital imaging. As a student of Sutherland, he was part of the university's DARPA program, sharing classes with James H. Clark, John Warnock and Alan Kay. From that point, his main goal was to make feature films using advanced computer graphics, an unheard-of concept at the time. During his time at the university, he made two new fundamental computer-graphics discoveries: texture mapping and bicubic patches; and invented algorithms for spatial anti-aliasing and refining subdivision surfaces. Catmull says the idea for subdivision surfaces came from mathematical structures in his mind when he applied B-splines to non-four sided objects. He also independently discovered Z-buffering, which had been described eight months before by Wolfgang Straßer in his PhD thesis. In 1972, Catmull made his earliest contribution to the film industry: a one-minute animated version of his left hand, titled A Computer Animated Hand, created with Fred Parke at the University of Utah. This short sequence was eventually picked up by a Hollywood producer and incorporated in the 1976 film Futureworld, which was the first film to use 3D computer graphics and a science-fiction sequel to the 1973 film Westworld, itself being the first to use a pixelated image generated by a computer. A Computer Animated Hand was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in December 2011.
Early career
Early career
In 1974, Catmull earned his doctorate in computer science, and was hired by a company called Applicon. By November of that year, he had been contacted by Alexander Schure, the founder of the New York Institute of Technology, who offered him the position as the director of the institute's new Computer Graphics Lab. In that position, in 1977, he invented Tween, software for 2D animation that automatically produced frames of motion in between two frames. However, Catmull's team lacked the ability to tell a story effectively via film, harming the effort to produce a motion picture via a computer. Catmull and his partner, Alvy Ray Smith, attempted to reach out to studios to alleviate this issue, but were generally unsuccessful until they attracted the attention of George Lucas at Lucasfilm.
Lucasfilm
Lucasfilm
Lucas approached Catmull in 1979 and asked him to lead a group to bring computer graphics, video editing, and digital sound into the entertainment field. Lucas had already made a deal with a computer company called Triple-I, and asked them to create a digital model of an X-wing fighter from Star Wars, which they did. In 1979, Catmull became the Vice President at Lucasfilm, set up to launch a "computer division" inside the company. By 1980 he had established three projects and recruited experts to lead them: the graphics group led by Alvy Ray Smith; the audio project led by Andy Moorer; the nonlinear editing project, led by Ralph Guggenheim.
Pixar
Pixar
In 1986, Steve Jobs bought Lucasfilm's digital division and founded Pixar, where Catmull works. Pixar would be acquired by Disney in 2006. In June 2007, Catmull and long-time Pixar digital animator and director John Lasseter were given control of Disneytoon Studios, a division of Walt Disney Animation housed in a separate facility in Glendale. As president and chief creative officer, respectively, they have supervised three separate studios for Disney, each with its own production pipeline: Pixar, Disney Animation, and Disneytoon. While Disney Animation and Disneytoon are located in the Los Angeles area, Pixar is located over 350 miles (563 kilometers) northwest in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Catmull and Lasseter both live. Accordingly, they appointed a general manager for each studio to handle day-to-day affairs on their behalf, then began regularly commuting each week to both Pixar and Disney Animation and spending at least two days per week (usually Tuesdays and Wednesdays) at Disney Animation. While at Pixar, Catmull was implicated in the High-Tech Employee Antitrust scandal, in which Bay Area technology companies allegedly agreed, among other things, not to cold-call recruit from one another. Catmull defended his actions in a deposition, saying: "While I have responsibility for the payroll, I have responsibility for the long term also." Disney and its subsidiaries, including Pixar, ultimately paid $100 million in settlement compensation. In November 2014, the general managers of Disney Animation and Pixar were both promoted to president, but both continued to report to Catmull, who retained the title of president of Walt Disney and Pixar. On October 23, 2018, Catmull announced his plans to retire from Pixar and Disney Animation, staying on as an adviser through July 2019.
Thatgamecompany
Thatgamecompany
In March 2022, Thatgamecompany announced the addition of Catmull as principal adviser on creative culture and strategic growth.
Personal life
Personal life
As of 2006, Catmull lives in Marin County, California, with his wife, Susan Anderson, and their three children. Catmull has an inability to form mental imagery within his head, a condition known as aphantasia.
Publications
Catmull, Ed; Amy Wallace (2014). Creativity Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-8129-9301-1. OCLC 851419994. Catmull, Ed (2016). "Part 2: Wealthy § Ed Catmull." Pp. 309–13 in Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers, edited by Tim Ferriss. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9781328683786.
Primary material
Documents and archives
reference work
- Wikidata, structured authority record Q93161: Edwin Catmull
Reputable secondary · Wikimedia Foundation
- “Edwin Catmull”, English Wikipedia, consulted as further reading
Reputable secondary · Wikipedia
scholarly publication
- 4.1 Der Realismus Pixars – Edwin Catmull als Brücke zwischen Produktions- und Bildästhetik, Image, 2023
Scholarly · Crossref registry · 2023
Awards and honors
In 1993, Catmull received his first Academy Scientific and Technical Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences "for the development of PhotoRealistic RenderMan software which produces images used in motion pictures from 3D computer descriptions of shape and appearance". He shared this award with Thomas K. Porter. In 1995, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Again in 1996, he received an Academy Scientific and Technical Award "for pioneering inventions in Digital Image Compositing". In 2000, Catmull was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation of digital imagery, leading to the introduction of fully synthetic visual effects and motion pictures. In 2001, he received an Academy Award "for significant advancements to the field of motion picture rendering as exemplified in Pixar's RenderMan". In 2006, he was awarded the IEEE John von Neumann All-Medal Crown Of Trophies for pioneering contributions to the field of computer graphics in modeling, animation, and rendering. At the 81st Academy Awards (2008, presented in February 2009), Catmull was awarded the Gordon E. Sawyer Award, which honors "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry". In 2013, the Computer History Museum named him a Museum Fellow "for his pioneering work in computer graphics, animation and filmmaking". His book Creativity, Inc. was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award (2014), and was a selection for Mark Zuckerberg book club in March 2015. Catmull shared the 2019 Turing Award with Pat Hanrahan for their pioneering work on computer-generated imagery.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Catmull, E. Recursively generated B-spline surfaces on arbitrary topological meshes. Computer-Aided Design. 10. 6. 350. 1978. 10.1016/0010-4485(78)90110-0.
- 2.Cook, R. L. The Reyes image rendering architecture. ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics. 21. 4. 95–102. 1987. 10.1145/37402.37414.
- 3.Price, David P. T. The Pixar Touch (Vintage). Vintage. 2009. 978-0-307-27829-6.
- 4.Rubin, Michael Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution (2005),
- 5.Avery, Laura. Newsmakers. Gale Research. 61. 2004. 978-0-7876-6806-8.
- 6.Katie, Harmer. Pixar ties to Utah run deep. Deseret News. June 20, 2013.
- 7.David A. Price. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. Alfred A. Knopf. 12–13, 21. 2008. 978-0-307-26950-8.
- 8.Ed Catmull: Creativity, Inc.
- 9.A conversation with Ed Catmull - ACM Queue. acm.org.
- 10.Innerview - Edwin Catmull
- 11.Oral History of Edwin "Ed" Catmull; 2013-03-01
- 12.Edwin Catmull. awards.acm.org.
- 13.Straßer, Wolfgang. Schnelle Kurven- und Flächendarstellung auf graphischen Sichtgeräten, Dissertation, TU Berlin, submitted April 26, 1974
- 14.2011 National Film Registry More Than a Box of Chocolates. Library of Congress. December 28, 2011.
- 15.Trenholm, Richard. Westworld's twists were hidden in Futureworld all along. CNET.
- 16.Itzkoff, Dave. 'Silence of the Lambs', 'Bambi' and 'Forrest Gump' added to National Film Registry. New York Times: Artsbeat. December 27, 2011.
- 17.Catmull, Edwin Earl. A subdivision algorithm for computer display of curved surfaces. University of Utah. 1974.
- 18.Hanrahan, Pat. A Conversation with Ed Catmull. queue.acm.org. November 13, 2010.
- 19.Edwin Catmull. 2008.
- 20.Rubin, Michael. Droidmaker : George Lucas and the digital revolution. Triad Pub. Co. 2006. 0-937404-67-5.
- 21.The Pixar Story: Dick Shoup, Alex Schure, George Lucas, Steve Jobs, and Disney. August 14, 2013.
- 22.Lev-Ram, Michal. A candid conversation with Pixar's philosopher-king, Ed Catmull. Fortune. Time Inc. December 31, 2014.
- 23.Johnson, Ted. Animation Workers Reach $100 Million Settlement With Disney in Wage-Fixing Suit. Variety. February 2017.
- 24.Amidi, Amid. Pixar's Ed Catmull Emerges As Central Figure In The Wage-Fixing Scandal. Cartoon Brew. July 11, 2014.
- 25.Ames, Mark. REVEALED: Emails, court docs show how Sony stood up to Steve Jobs' and Pixar's wage-fixing cartel. Pando.
- 26.Rosenblatt, Joel. A conspiracy or a lawsuit all about money?. independent.ie. November 20, 2014.
- 27.Cano, Georgia. Op-Ed: Why I Filed The Wage-Theft Lawsuit Against Major Animation Studios. Cartoon Brew. February 2019.
- 28.Graser, Marc. Walt Disney Animation, Pixar Promote Andrew Millstein, Jim Morris to President. Variety. Variety Media, LLC. November 18, 2014.
- 29.Pixar Co-Founder Ed Catmull to Retire. The Hollywood Reporter.
- 30.Sky and Journey maker Thatgamecompany raises $160M. VentureBeat. 2022-03-03.
- 31.Eller, Claudia. Disney's Low-Key Superhero. Los Angeles Times. June 12, 2006.
- 32.Gallagher, James. Aphantasia: Ex-Pixar chief Ed Catmull says 'my mind's eye is blind'. BBC News. 9 April 2019.
- 33.Three Pixar execs get special Oscars. San Francisco Chronicle. February 1, 1996.
- 34.Moody, Annemarie. Academy to Honor Ed Catmull with Gordon E. Sawyer Oscar. Animation World Network. January 6, 2009.
- 35.Computerhistory.org. Edwin Catmull—CHM Fellow Award Winner. March 30, 2015.
- 36.Andrew Hill. Shortlist unveiled for FT and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. Financial Times. September 24, 2014.
- 37.Richard Feloni. Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone can learn something from Pixar. Business Insider. March 3, 2015.
- 38.Metz, Cade. Pixar Pioneers Win $1 Million Turing Award. The New York Times. March 18, 2020.
- 39.Thomas, Zoe. Pixar animators win 'Nobel Prize' of computing. BBC News. 2020-04-05.
References
Citations
References
Each reference names the institution holding it, so a reader may go to the document itself.
scholarly publication
4.1 Der Realismus Pixars – Edwin Catmull als Brücke zwischen Produktions- und Bildästhetik, Image, 2023Crossref registry
Verifiedreference work
Wikidata, structured authority record Q93161: Edwin CatmullWikimedia Foundation
Partially resolvedreference work
Partially resolved
The Encyclopedia exists whether or not anything is for sale. Corrections are recorded rather than overwritten, and every version of this record is kept. Published 14 August 2026.
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