Henri Gouraud (computer scientist)

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

Gouraud, who comes from a family of military, attended the military school Prytanée national militaire in La Flèche and studied 1964 to 1967 at the École Centrale Paris ( with a diploma engineer degree ), specialized in computer science at the Institut Supérieur de l' Aéronautique et de l' Espace ( Supaero ) and was from 1968 to David Evans and Ivan Sutherland at the University of Utah, where he became in 1971 a PhD (Computer display of curved surfaces ). In his dissertation he developed the Gouraud shading, which he demonstrated at pictures of his wife Sylvie. After completing his doctorate, he returned to serve his military service returned to France, he performed the in a research group of the French Air Force. After that, he spent 10 years in the IT consulting firm Tecsi, a subsidiary of Alcatel CIT, founded by some of his former professors at the Supaero. He was a short time from 1982 at the Centre Mondial de l' Informatique, which was led by Jean -Jacques Servan- Schreiber, and founded in 1983 with his former fellow student Patrick Baudelaire and others, the software company for computer graphics Tangram, which was acquired by DEC 1986. Gouraud also worked after the acquisition continues at DEC led by the Research Director Robert Taylor. Following the acquisition of DEC by Compaq, he left the company and became Director of the European Research Centre of Sun Microsystems in Grenoble, which was closed in 2004. After that, he worked for the French Internet software company Exalead.

He was a Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite in 1996.

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

Writings

• Continuous shading of curved surfaces, IEEE Transactions on Computers, C -20, 1971, No. 6, pp. 623-629