Career
He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Steven Coons had a vision of interactive computer graphics as a design tool to aid the engineer and
This concept allows for the approximate matching of any curve, conic or not. The surface element plane normally a conic curve was expressed as:
By selecting proper values for Φ (similar to K in the conic family) in this equation:
the curve will be fixed.
By arbitrarily choosing values of Φ, u and w could be solved for:
During World World War II, he worked on the design of aircraft surfaces, developing the mathematics to describe generalized "surface patches." At Massachusetts Institute of Technology"s Electronic Systems Laboratory he investigated the mathematical formulation for these patches, and published one of the most significant contributions to the area of geometric design, a treatise which has become known as "The Little Red Book" in 1967.
His "Coons patch" was a formulation that presented the notation, mathematical foundation, and intuitive interpretation of an idea that would ultimately become the foundation for surface descriptions that are commonly used today, such as b-spline surfaces, NURB surfaces, et cetera His technique for describing a surface was to construct it out of collections of adjacent patches, which had continuity constraints that would allow surfaces to have curvature which was expected by the designer.
Each patch was defined by four boundary curves, and a set of "blending functions" that defined how the interior was constructed out of interpolated values of the boundaries. Coons"s students included Ivan Sutherland and Lawrence Roberts, both of whom went on to make numerous contributions to computer graphics and (in Roberts" case) to computer networks.
Coons also advised Nicholas Negroponte.
Coons co-authored, with John Thomas Rule, a book on mechanical drawing and graphic methods entitled Graphics c. 1961.
The Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques has an award named for Coons. The Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics is given in odd-numbered years to an individual to honor that person"s lifetime contribution to computer graphics and interactive techniques.
lieutenant is considered the field"s most prestigious award.
Recipients
Henry Fuchs (2015)
Turner Whitted (2013)
Jim Kajiya (2011)
Robert L. Cook (2009)
Nelson Max (2007)
Tomoyuki Nishita (2005)
Pat Hanrahan (2003)
Lance J. Williams (2001)
James F. Blinn (1999)
James Doctorate. Foley (1997)
José Luis Encarnação (1995)
Edwin Catmull (1993)
Andries van Dam (1991)
David C. Evans (1989)
Donald P. Greenberg (1987)
Pierre Bézier (1985)
Ivan East. Sutherland (1983)
T.B. Sheridan, Steven A. Coons and H.M.Paynter, SOME NOVEL DISPLAY TECHNIQUES FOR DRIVING SIMULATION Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers TRANSACTIONS Ontario HUMAN FACTORS Indiana ENGINEERING volunteer HFE5 (1) 29, 1964. Steven A. Coons, COMPUTER GRAPHICS AND INNOVATIVE ENGINEERING DESIGN – SUPER-SCULPTOR, DATAMATION 12 (5) 32–34, 1966.
Steven A. Coons, United States Employment Service OF COMPUTERS Indiana TECHNOLOGY, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN 215 (3) 177, 1966. Doctorate.V. Ahuja and Steven A. Coons, GEOMETRY FOR CONSTRUCTION AND DISPLAY, International Business Machines Corporation SYSTEMS JOURNAL 7 (3–4) 188, 1968.
Steven A. Coons, MODIFICATION OF Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe OF PIECEWISE CURVES, COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN 9 (3) 178–180, 1977.
Steven A. Coons, CONSTRAINED LEAST-SQUARES, COMPUTERS & GRAPHICS 3 (1) 43–47, 1978.