The Vietnamese Computer Scientist Who Made Toy Story Possible
time.comForever immortalized in ReBoot!
this was such a great show!!!
Help me track down one episode. The one where the system was going down for reboot. So of course there were musical numbers. The name & number of the episode escape me.
It had one of the best last episodes of any show that I've seen =).
Ohhhhhhh this is where Phong lighting comes from! Legend!
As a kid, probably 12 or 13 playing in 3dsmax, not having a clue what phong did other than make things look smooth.
Thats awesome that, even after having zero to do with design or 3d modeling, 20+ years later the name stands out to me.
Had the exact same experience. It's been a term to me, not a name, until now.
I came across this guy last week when I was learning about implementing basic lighting in shaders and Phong lighting is the starter for that. So I looked him up and what a tragic story.
I once had a cat named Phong (because her shading was very pretty). RIP kitty!
> That Bùi’s life story remains so unknown, to others in his field as well as to the broader public, seems to exemplify racist stereotypes about technically skilled but otherwise faceless Asians, and reflects an unwillingness to reckon with Asian American history.
Hold up. This seems forced.
What would've driven this fellow to household recognition? Even his billionaire, surviving peer, Ed Catmull, and the commercial face of Pixar isn't a household name.
Yea, looking at the list of "Computer Graphics Pioneers" on wikipedia, Mandelbrot and maybe Carmack are the only two I'd think would be recognized by the broader public, and Carmack is the only one I personally could tell you any biographical details about.
I don't think there's any reason to think Bùi's obscurity is due to any particular prejudice against Asian Americans.
I guarantee you I could ask any member of my family, including my wife, if they've heard of Mandelbrot or John Carmack, and they'd say "no".
This is indeed a bit forced.
Anecdote of one, but I had heard of Phong but not Catmull, actually. (Because I was curious about Phong lighting, so then read the wikipedia article which pointed me to him). Your comment is the first time I'd ever heard of Ed Catmull.
I tried to extract everything that looked like a name from the History section of the Wikipedia article on computer graphics.
I had heard of Bui Tuong Phong, Henri Gouraud, Ivan Sutherland, John Carmack, John Warnock, Martin Newell, and Nelson Max.
I hadn't heard of Arthur Appel, Dave Evans, David Immel, David Pearson, Edwin Catmull, Elizabeth Waldram, Frank Sinden, Fred Parke, James Clark, James Kajiya, Jim Blinn, Ken Knowlton, Maurice Benayoun, Michael Noll, Ralph Baer, Steve Russell, Tom Stockham, Verne Hudson, William Fetter, or William Higinbotham.
I haven't studied computer graphics, other than doing the Raytracing in One Weekend project.
(Oops, I missed people with accented, abbreviated, or uncapitalized names, like Pierre Bézier, David C. Evans, and Paul de Casteljau. I don't think this will change the ratio much, though.)
I agree this is ridiculous. Anyone in computer graphics knows his name.
People don't know his life story just because he was the first to interpolate normals between the vertices of triangles for smooth shading and created an exponential falloff for a highlight.
If he didn't do that first, someone else would have done it pretty quickly after, but in the 70s 3D computer graphics was so niche there were only a few people in the world with access to enough memory to hold a single color image.
Also the title saying he made toy story possible is ridiculous clickbait. He had nothing to do with toy story and it came many years after his work.
Not only that toy story was done with renderman and curved patches that were broken down into pixel sized polygons with highlights that were probably similar to blinn, so it's actually an example of phong interpolation and shading not being used.
This is overall terrible journalism that makes distant connections to pop culture for clickbait.
I'm not sure. Pretty much all but 0.000001% of us tech peeps go completely unnoticed by the general public no matter how awesome our contributions to tech without regard to race, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, or ethnic identity...
Thanks for sharing. I always wondered who was behind Phong shading algorithm.
I find it rather distasteful that the author chose to drag in an unsupported theory about Phong's tragic illness and death. The school cited was several miles from the closest of the three locations mentioned (Tan Son Nhut), and the military wasn't spraying Saigon.
Is it possible he was heavily exposed during the two years when that would have been possible? Many things are possible, of course. Is there any evidence whatsoever? I've been unable to find any citations to that effect. Certainly the author didn't bother.
It _is_ a bit damning that he died, though, of an ailment that is primarily the outcome of the _carcinogens the US was willingly dumping as an assault on the country_.
I mean, it’s not a smoking gun, but does that really matter?
Man died at 35 and lived in epicenter for chemical known for triggering cause (leukemia) of death, but we can't presume?
Parent isn't even being charitable.
Author qualified the linkage as unproven:
> It is impossible to ignore the possibility that these chemicals contributed to his early death.
What _is_ up _with_ _this stuff_?
Underscores work as emphasis in many markup languages, including markdown, but not here in HN regrettably.
Helping you read the intonation of me talking. It’s how I write.
It only makes it harder to read without proper md.
Tremendous story, a well researched personal destiny as well as an introduction to the geopolitics of the last century. One takeaway is how obviously poisonous substances (Agent Orange) were sprayed over large swathes of land in Vietnam and elsewhere for military tactical purposes, causing medical conditions of varying severity for 3 out of 4 million people affected in Vietnam. It was heavily criticized at the time, as it could be suspected of being harmful to humans as well as the forests and crops that were targeted, but it did not stop the program. [0].
R.I.P. Bùi Tường Phong.
It was chemical warfare. If you've seen the birth defects and health effects, it's shocking.
Not taking away from the stats, but that stat is weirdly worded.
> 3 out of 4 million people affected in vietnam
Are there only 4 million total people? Were 4 million affected and 3 million a subset of effect? Are they trying to say 3 in 4?
"The government of Vietnam says that up to four million people in Vietnam were exposed to the defoliant, and as many as three million people have suffered illness because of Agent Orange" according to linked Wikipedia article.
Mi interpretation is 4 millions exposed to Agent Orange, 3 millions developed medical conditions as a result.
Never knew who developed Phong shading. I was asking myself why was it named like that but I didn't bother to search.
Paper on arXiv (ACM format), same authors as this article (and mostly same content):
Sad to see they are laying off staff from Pixar right after this story. https://variety.com/2024/film/news/pixar-layoffs-175-staffer...
This story doesn't really have anything to do with toy story and toy story doesn't have anything to do with layoffs.
Blaming audiences for flops is so lame. It's not the audiences' fault that Pixar lost their magic.
Didn't know his connection with sutherland nor his personal life. Thanks
always amazing how ahead of the big data curve the graphics people have been
> Nevertheless, our close examination of his publications removes the ambiguity. The cover of his dissertation clearly delineates his family name from his compound given name, and in his final publication, he listed his last name as “Bui.” The preponderance of evidence suggests that he was Dr. Bùi, but the scientific literature misidentifies him as Dr. Phong.
> This also suggests that “Phong shading” is a misnomer, but for reasons that will likely remain unknown, Bùi did not contest the naming. While he may not have coined the eponym himself, he referenced it in his dissertation and final publication.
I'm nowhere near as smart but if something's going to be named after me, as a Vietnamese, please please please use my given name. Either given name or given name + middle name or full name. Considering he also used it himself, he was probably more ok about it than the author thinks.
I understand it's the custom in English speaking academia to use family name and I only want to speak for myself, not for all Vietnamese and especially someone from 50 years ago. I also have the most common family name so the sentiments of someone with a less common one might be different.
Funnily enough, on his Wikipedia page, they also note about this:
> In this Vietnamese name, the surname is Bui. In accordance with Vietnamese custom, this person should be referred to by the given name, Phong.
Probably a better stance. It was kind of a reach by the the Time's article's author.
> please please please use my given name.
I assume, and please correct me if I misrepresent your reason, that you're referring to the fact that most Vietnamese have last names from a very small pool?
For those unaware: The 10 most common last names in Vietnam makes up 85% of the population, and nearly half Nguyen alone. I looked it up and Bùi is far less common, but still represents 11% of the population...
For comparison, only .7% of the US population is named Smith.
So in terms of naming something so you get recognition, in Vietnam Bùi is about 16 times worse than Smith would be in the US... Of course, internationally it might have made relatively little difference.
(and if it's not on the list of falsehoods programmers might believe about names - I haven't checked - Vietnamese is one good reason why if anyone think sharding users by last name is a good idea, thinking names like Smith is the worst case, depending on their demographics they may be wildly wrong)
Yes, it's one of the reason. As a result, it's super rare to refer to someone by their family name in Vietnamese. Casually people use given names and formally people use full names.
Family names usually come up when referring to the whole family branch of 9-10+ generations like the Nguyễn family or the Bùi family. Because there are few family names, you often see family branches use family name+middle name of the first ancestor to be more specific.
In Vietnamese culture, we don't really use the surname by itself, it's only used in a formal context where the full name is needed.
Most Vietnamese would prefer to be called by their given name, there is no implication of a relationship like "on a first-name basis".
Closest is:
23. Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
I agree. The publishing tradition is [first name][last name], which should be followed for our convenience sake. But the author can choose whatever first and last name. What really matters is that, in a jungle of citations, the reader seeing the shortened name can pinpoint them specifically. While Eastern cultures may place less emphasis of differentiating using the middle name like Vietnam, the author can use Last-Mid as their Last (consistent with VN's tradition), or Mid-First as their First. Just use it consistently.
There are too many stories of true inventors not getting the credit or notoriety that they deserve. The things that our government did in Vietnam and WWII in Asia are shocking.