Thursday, April 26 7:30 - 9:00 pm William R. Hewlett Teaching Center Free; no registration is required. Open to the public

Brainstorms is a quarterly series highlighting research by Stanford faculty in the new frontiers of science and technology. It is hosted by the associate deans in the schools of Engineering, Medicine, and Humanities and Sciences, and is co-sponsored by Stanford Continuing Studies and Stanford’s Office of Science Outreach.

Computer graphics have revolutionized the entertainment industry. It is now possible to make pictures of fictitious places and people that are essentially indistinguishable from photographs of real places and people. This all seems magical, but it is based on a simple understanding of the physics of the everyday world. Why do things look the way they do? Why are they shaped the way they are? And what is behind movement and behavior? The answers to these questions are built into computer graphics systems. Behind the scenes of computer graphics are complex models and sophisticated simulations. In this lecture, we will look behind the “scenes,” and see how the magic tricks are done.

PAT HANRAHAN Canon USA Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Pat Hanrahan teaches computer graphics and does research in the fields of visualization, image synthesis, and graphics systems and architectures. Before joining Stanford he was a faculty member at Princeton. He has also worked at Pixar where he was the chief architect of the RenderMan™ Interface—a protocol that allows modeling programs to describe scenes to high quality rendering programs. Professor Hanrahan has received numerous awards, including three teaching awards and two Academy Awards for Science and Technology. He was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.