Background
Phong was born in Hanoi, then French Indochina.
Phong was born in Hanoi, then French Indochina.
After attending the Lycée Albert Sarraut there, he moved with his family to Saigon in 1954, where he attended the Lycée Jean Jacques Rousseau.
His publications are most often referred to using his family name, Bui, which comes before his given name by Vietnamese convention. His inventions are remembered under his given name Phong, since it is conventional to address Vietnamese persons by their given name. He went to France in 1964 and was admitted to the Grenoble Institute of Technology.
He received his Licence ès Sciences from Grenoble in 1966 and his Diplôme d"Ingénieur from the École nationale supérieure d'électronique, d'électrotechnique, d'informatique, d'hydraulique et des télécommunications. French engineering school (Grande École) in Electrical Engineering, Electronics, Computer Science, Hydraulics and Telecommunications)(, Toulouse, in 1968.
In 1968, he joined the Institut de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (then IRIA) as a researcher in Computer Science, working in the development of operating systems for digital computers. He went to the University of Utah College of Engineering in September 1971 as a research assistant in Computer Science and he received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Utah in 1973.
Phong knew that he was terminally ill with leukemia while he was a student. In 1975, after his tenure at the University of Utah, Phong joined Stanford University as a professor
He died not long after finishing his dissertation.
Phong was married to Bùi Thị Ngọc Bích from Nha Trang, Vietnam, in 1969 in Paris, France. About improving the quality of synthesized images he wrote, "We do not expect to be able to display the object exactly as it would appear in reality, with texture, overcast shadows, et cetera We hope only to display an image that approximates the real object closely enough to provide a certain degree of realism."
Phong was the inventor of the Phong reflection model and the Phong shading interpolation method, techniques widely used in computer graphics.
He published the description of the algorithms in his 1973 Doctor of Philosophy dissertation and a 1975 paper.
He developed the first algorithm for simulating specular phenomena. When working on his doctorate, he was very focused on selecting a topic and completing his dissertation very fast.
Professor David C. Evans very enthusiastically supported him in this project Professor Ivan Sutherland worked with him for improving the previous Mach banding problems, and on using normals for shading.
His fellow students also supported him very much, as James H. Clark, Franklin C. Crow, George Randall, Dennis Ting and John Riley.
He finished his dissertation much faster than other students of the time did. Phong, Robert McDermott, Jim Clark and Raphael Rom had created the very first computer graphics generated picture that looked like its physical model: the Volkswagen Beetle. As a computer graphics icon, it still crops up in highly respected journals and animated features.