Papers

By Ivan Sutherland Sun Microsystems Laboratories, Mountain View, CA. Perspectives Series 96-1, April 1996. Notes and original version. 1. Introduction Sutherland is a Scottish name. My ancestors came from the northernmost county in Scotland, called Sutherlandshire, a land where cows grow long hair against the cold, trees mostly refuse to grow at all, and the farmers cut peat to heat their homes. I enjoyed the sunrise at 3 AM there one summer morning, it having set about 11 PM the previous evening....

Published in: IRE Transactions on Information Theory (Volume: 2, Issue: 1, March 1956). DOI: 10.1109/TIT.1956.1056774. Information theory has, in the last few years, become something of a scientific bandwagon. Starting as a technical tool for the communication engineer, it has received an extraordinary amount of publicity in the popular as well as the scientific press. In part, this has been due to connections with such fashionable fields as computing machines, cybernetics, and automation; and in part, to the novelty of its subject matter....