Miller Puckette

Miller Smith Puckette, born in 1959 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, is an American computer scientist and musician best known for authoring Max, a visual programming language for music and multimedia, which he began developing in 1988 at IRCAM in Paris while working with the composer Philippe Manoury. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), an open source successor to Max written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities. He first became involved with computer music through Barry Vercoe as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1986 and was a member of the MIT Media Lab from 1985 to 1987. He is professor emeritus of computer music at the University of California, San Diego, where he was associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts from 2000 until its closure in 2011.