Biography:Henry Fuchs

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Fuchs is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a fellow of European Association for Computer Graphics (Eurographics). His contributions have been recognized with numerous awards including the ACM SIGGRAPH Steven A. Coons Award, the IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award, and the ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award; he was also inducted into the inaugural ACM SIGGRAPH Academy (2018), received an honorary doctorate from TU Wien (2018), and was named a Eurographics Fellow (2020).[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10]

Henry Fuchs
Henry Fuchs
Fuchs speaking at NASA Langley in 2009.
Born20 January 1948 (1948-01-20) (age 77)
Tokaj, Hungary
CitizenshipAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Utah
Known forBinary space partitioning
Pixel-Planes architecture
AwardsFellow of the AAAS
Fellow of the ACM
Member of the NAE
ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award
Steven Anson Coons Award
Scientific career
FieldsComputer scientist
Biomedical engineer
InstitutionsUNC
UT Dallas
ThesisThe Automatic Sensing and Analysis of Three-Dimensional Surface Points from Visual Scenes (1975)
Doctoral advisorRobert P. Plummer
Doctoral students

Fuchs has previously served as the Technical Program Chairman for ACM SIGGRAPH, an Associate Editor and Guest Editor for ACM Transactions on Graphics (ToG), the Awards Chair for IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Community (VGTC), a member of the Advisory Committees for National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and National Research Council (NRC), a member of the Steering Committee for IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Realities (ISMAR).[11][12][13][14][15][16]

Henry Fuchs at "Visual Computing Trends" in Vienna, Austria, 2015

Early life and education

Born in Tokaj, Hungary, Fuchs and his family immigrated to the United States in 1957.[17] He received his bachelor's degree in Information and Computer Science from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1970 and his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Utah in 1975.[18] His dissertation, supervised by Robert P. Plummer, was on the automatic sensing and analysis of 3D surface points.[19]

Career and research

Fuchs began his career as a programmer at UC Santa Cruz and later as an engineer at the Image Processing Laboratory of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. After completing his Ph.D., he became an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. In 1978, he joined the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was promoted to the Federico Gil Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in 1988, a position which he still holds.[20]

His major research contributions have centered on developing high-performance graphics systems to solve complex, real-world problems.

Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) trees

In 1980, Fuchs co-developed the BSP tree[21], a novel data structure for rapidly rendering 3D scenes.[22] This algorithm efficiently determined which objects were visible to the viewer and was highly influential in the development of 3D video games, including the landmark title Doom.[23]

Pixel-Planes and PixelFlow

Beginning in the 1980s, Fuchs co-led a team that designed and built several powerful parallel-processing graphics engines. The Pixel-Planes and later PixelFlow systems pioneered architectures that distributed computation to the pixel level, dramatically accelerating rendering speeds. This work was foundational to the development of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).[24][25]

Medical virtual and augmented reality

Fuchs has been a leader in applying computer graphics to medicine. His UNC team developed systems for 3D medical imaging and guidance. A key project was an ultrasound-guided needle biopsy system that used augmented reality to superimpose live 3D ultrasound imagery onto the patient, allowing for more precise instrument navigation during procedures.[24][26]

Awards and honors

1992: ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award[27]

1992: National Computer Graphics Association Academic Award, NCGA

1995: ACM Fellow[28]

1997: Elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for contributions to computer graphics hardware and algorithms.[29]

1997: Satava Award, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality Conference[30]

1997: American Academy of Arts & Sciences[31]

2013: IEEE-VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award[24]

2015: Steven Anson Coons Award for Outstanding Creative Contributions to Computer Graphics[32]

2015: IEEE Fellow[33]

2018: The first class of ACM SIGGRAPH Academy[34]

2018: ISMAR Career Impact Award[35]

2018: ISMAR Best Paper Award[36]

2018: Honorary Doctorate, TU Wien[37]

2020: Eurographics Fellow[38]

References

  1. ↑ "NAE Member Directory: Henry Fuchs". National Academy of Engineering. https://www.nae.edu/. 
  2. ↑ "American Academy of Arts & Sciences – Member: Henry Fuchs". https://www.amacad.org/person/henry-fuchs. 
  3. ↑ "Henry Fuchs – ACM Fellows". https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/fuchs_1256775. 
  4. ↑ "2015 IEEE Fellows". 18 December 2014. https://www.computer.org/press-room/news-archive/2015-fellows/. 
  5. ↑ "Computer Graphics Achievement Award". https://www.siggraph.org/awards/computer-graphics-achievement-award/. 
  6. ↑ "Steven A. Coons Award: Henry Fuchs". https://www.siggraph.org/awards/steven-a-coons-award/. 
  7. ↑ "VGTC Virtual Reality Career Award". https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/awards/virtual-augmented-reality-technical-awards/. 
  8. ↑ "ACM SIGGRAPH Academy". ACM SIGGRAPH. 2019. pp. 6–8. https://www.siggraph.org/awards/acm-siggraph-academy/. 
  9. ↑ "Honoraries — TU Wien Informatics". 8 May 2018. https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/honoraries/. 
  10. ↑ "New Fellows 2020". 2020. https://www.eg.org/wp/fellows/new-fellows-2020/. 
  11. ↑ Fuchs, Henry (8 March 2015). "Henry FUCHS – Curriculum Vitae". https://henryfuchs.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/4964/2014/12/Henry-FUCHS-cv-March-8-2015.pdf. 
  12. ↑ Fuchs, Henry (1982). "Guest Editor's Introduction". ACM Transactions on Graphics 1 (1): 5–6. doi:10.1145/357290.357292. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/357290.357292. Retrieved 12 September 2025. 
  13. ↑ "IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Awards — Award Winners (chair contact)". 2021. https://ieeevr.org/2021/awards/vgtc-award-winners/. 
  14. ↑ "IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Awards — Nominations (Chair: Henry Fuchs)". 2021. https://ieeevr.org/2021/awards/vgtc/. 
  15. ↑ "ISMAR 2022 – Steering Committee Members". 2022. https://ismar2022.org/ismar-steering-committee/. 
  16. ↑ "Evolving the High Performance Computing and Communications Initiative… — Committee roster". National Research Council (National Academies Press). 1995. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/download/4948. 
  17. ↑ Fuchs, Ilona (October 2007). "Exile & Return: The Personal Story of Ilona Engel Fuchs". Kehillah Synagogue. https://kehillahsynagogue.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/fuchs-speech.pdf. 
  18. ↑ Fuchs, Henry. "Henry Fuchs Academic Home Page". University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://henryfuchs.web.unc.edu/. 
  19. ↑ "The Automatic Sensing and Analysis of Three-Dimensional Surface Points from Visual Scenes". 1975. https://www.proquest.com/openview/2e507d5fb4cbd8ba7b7de267ecd49ec6/. 
  20. ↑ Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named unc-bio
  21. ↑ Fuchs, Henry; Kedem, Zvi M.; Naylor, Bruce F. (1980). "On visible surface generation by a priori tree structures". pp. 124–133. doi:10.1145/800250.807484. 
  22. ↑ Fuchs, H.; Kedem, Z.M.; Naylor, B.F. (July 1980). "A linear time exact hidden surface algorithm". Proceedings of the 7th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques - SIGGRAPH '80. pp. 117–125. doi:10.1145/800250.807480. ISBN 0-89791-021-4. 
  23. ↑ Sanglard, Fabien (2018). "Chapter 4: The World". Game Engine Black Book: Doom. Fabien Sanglard. pp. 121–158. ISBN 978-1987418439. "The task of sorting polygons from back to front is solved using a pre-calculated data structure called a Binary Space Partitioning tree (BSP). [...] Thanks to the BSP, the engine knows the exact drawing order of the segs to perfectly render the scene." 
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 "2013 Virtual Reality Career Award: Henry Fuchs". IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee. 2013. https://vgtc.org/awards/virtual-reality-career-award/henry-fuchs. 
  25. ↑ Fuchs, H. (July 1989). "Pixel-planes 5: A heterogeneous multiprocessor graphics system using processor-enhanced memories". Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. pp. 79–88. doi:10.1145/74333.74341. ISBN 0-89791-312-4. 
  26. ↑ State, A. (August 1996). "Rendering from compressed textures". Proceedings of the 23rd annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. pp. 439–446. doi:10.1145/237170.237276. ISBN 0-89791-746-4. 
  27. ↑ "1992 SIGGRAPH Achievement Award: Henry Fuchs". ACM SIGGRAPH Awards. https://awards.siggraph.org/achievement-award/1992-2/. 
  28. ↑ "Henry Fuchs" (in en). https://awards.acm.org/award_winners/fuchs_1256775. 
  29. ↑ "NAE Website - Dr. Henry Fuchs". National Academy of Engineering. https://www.nae.edu/30784/Dr-Henry-Fuchs. 
  30. ↑ "Henry Fuchs Home Page". UNC Department of Computer Science. http://www.cs.unc.edu/~fuchs/. 
  31. ↑ "Henry Fuchs | American Academy of Arts and Sciences" (in en). 2025-07-01. https://www.amacad.org/person/henry-fuchs. 
  32. ↑ "2015 Steven A. Coons Award: Henry Fuchs". ACM SIGGRAPH Awards. https://awards.siggraph.org/coons-award/2015-2/. 
  33. ↑ Mansfield, Kathy (2018-03-27). "2015 Fellows" (in en-US). https://www.computer.org/press-room/news-archive/2015-fellows/. 
  34. ↑ 10am (2018-08-10). "ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 Award Winners" (in en-US). https://www.siggraph.org/news/acm-siggraph-2018-award-winners/. 
  35. ↑ Committtee, ISMAR Conference. "International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality | ISMAR 2018" (in en). https://www.ismar2018.org/. 
  36. ↑ "FocusAR: Auto-focus Augmented Reality Eyeglasses for both Real and Virtual | ISMAR 2018" (in en). https://www.ismar2018.org/papers/tvcg2018_pcs_paper_1047.html. 
  37. ↑ "Henry Fuchs and Moshe Vardi receive honorary doctorates from TU Wien". TU Wien. May 8, 2018. https://informatics.tuwien.ac.at/news/1529. 
  38. ↑ "New Fellows 2020 – Eurographics" (in en-US). https://www.eg.org/wp/fellows/new-fellows-2020/. 

Henry Fuchs home page at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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