Kurt Akeley

Kurt Akeley (born June 8, 1958) is an American computer graphics engineer.

Akeley was elected into the National Academy of Engineering in 2005 for contributions to the architecture of 3-D graphics systems and the definition of Open GL, now the industry standard.

That year, he joined with Jim Clark in the founding team of Silicon Graphics, Incorporated (later renamed SGI).

[citation needed] In 1984, Akeley's colleagues at Silicon Graphics recognized his contributions by selecting him as the first overall Spirit of SGI award winner.

[3] During this time, Akeley consulted at NVIDIA and collaborated on the design of the Cg hardware shading languages for GPUs.