Paul E. Haeberli

Timeline

1. 1983

   Joining Silicon Graphics

   Trained in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, he is recruited by James H. Clark and starts at Silicon Graphics in February 1983. His early work includes code for the IRIS 1000, the company's first product, developed with David J. Brown and Mark Grossman.

2. 1984

   A VAX sequence analysis paper

   In 1984, he coauthors 'A comprehensive set of sequence analysis programs for the VAX' with John Devereux and Oliver Smithies in Nucleic Acids Research. It is among his highly cited papers.

3. 1988–1989

   ConMan and Dynadraw

   In 1988, he presents ConMan at SIGGRAPH, a visual language on an IRIS workstation that lets users build and modify graphics applications by connecting simple components. In June 1989, he writes Dynadraw, a drawing program that models the brush as a physical object with mass, velocity and friction.

4. 1990

   Paint by Numbers at SIGGRAPH

   His SIGGRAPH 1990 paper Paint by Numbers shows how controlling the color, shape, size and orientation of individual brush strokes yields impressionistic paintings of photographic images. With Kurt Akeley, he also presents the accumulation buffer, an extra high-precision image buffer that handles aliasing, motion blur and depth of field.

5. 1993

   Texture mapping as a drawing primitive

   In June 1993, he and Mark Segal publish 'Texture mapping as a fundamental drawing primitive,' a survey of uses for texture-mapping hardware. The paper covers anti-aliased lines, air-brushes, anti-aliased text, volume rendering and environment mapping.

6. 1994–1999

   GRAFICA Obscura goes online

   In 1994, inspired by Dave Brown, he starts converting his unpublished work to HTML, and it appears in GRAFICA Obscura, his evolving computer graphics notebook of technical notes, pictures and essays. He stays a computer graphics researcher at Silicon Graphics until August 1999.

7. 2004–2006

   Lamina Design and free-form structures

   In 2004, he starts a project on fabricating precise free-form structures from planar material and founds Lamina Design. Its Lamina 1.0 software makes it easy to fabricate large-scale free-form structures from plastic, metal or plywood sheets, and The Architectural Record reviews it in December 2004. In September 2006, he gives a talk on building free-form structures from sheet material at the Fourth International Conference on Origami in Science, Mathematics, and Education.

8. Since 2011

   PhotoViva and Enlighten

   His company Lamina Design brings out PhotoViva in 2011, an iOS app with paint brushes that turn photos into abstract painted interpretations. He also publishes Enlighten, a C program that automatically fixes high dynamic range images, on GitHub, where it is updated in July 2023.