Martin Newell

Martin Edward Newell is a British-born computer scientist who specialised in computer graphics. He is best known as the creator of the Utah teapot, a model that became one of the benchmark objects of three-dimensional rendering. Before moving to the United States he worked at the Computer-Aided Design Centre in Cambridge, UK, where he, his brother Dick Newell and Tom Sancha developed Newell's algorithm, a technique for eliminating cyclic dependencies when ordering polygons to be drawn. He completed a doctorate at the University of Utah in 1975 and was on its faculty from 1977 to 1979. He later worked at Xerox PARC on JaM, a predecessor of PostScript, led software development at the factory automation startup CADLINC, and founded the design software company Ashlar in 1988. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2007 and retired as an Adobe Fellow.