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It is a bit of a surprise when Danny Cohen sits down at the table in his Palo Alto flat with nothing but a few sheets of paper, and a lovely vintage Mont Blanc fountain pen. As someone who built some of the foundational technologies we use today, you expect a flurry of gadgets to accompany a conversation about his journey through the inspiration and insights related to flight simulators, conference calls and chip making. Turns out a pen, ink and paper is more than enough to sketch out a lifetime of big ideas when wielded by the man whose curiosity and creativity yielded them.
ReplyDeleteCohen, born and raised in Israel, had a friend in his days at the nation’s leading engineering school who was a fighter pilot. This was when Israel was still battling Egypt, and Cohen’s pilot comrade would tell stories about combat in the skies above the Sinai desert. Cohen became interested in flying, not just as skill to master (he would later become an accomplished pilot), but also as a problem to represent graphically on a computer. Here’s where the fountain pen ink starts to fly.
“The biggest problem in drawing this kind of thing, is there is a line that starts in front of you and ends behind you,” Cohen says, drawing out a simple flight path in blue ink. How do you represent that line, that mountain, enemy plane or runway as a feature that behaves like 3-D objects do as we move toward or away from them? “The key to do it,” Cohen says, “Is to understand how to do 3-D clipping.” In simple terms, what you see, and what becomes hidden as your perspective changes.
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