James F. Blinn

James F. Blinn (born 1949) is an American computer scientist who first became widely known for his work as a computer graphics expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, particularly his pre-encounter animations for the Voyager project and his work on the 1980 Carl Sagan documentary series Cosmos, as well as for the Blinn-Phong shading model. In 2000 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his educational computer graphics contributions and expository articles. He is known for formulating Blinn's Law, which observes that rendering time stays roughly constant even as computing power increases because animators enhance quality rather than reduce processing time. He received the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award in 1999.