Nelson Max is a professor[1] of computer science at the University of California at Davis.
He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1967, advised by Herman Gluck.
He has rendered realistic lighting effects in clouds, trees, and water waves, and has produced numerous computer animations, shown at the annual ACM SIGGRAPH conferences, and in OMNIMAX stereo at the Fujitsu Pavilions at Expo ’85 in Tsukuba Japan, and at Expo ’90 in Osaka Japan.
His computer animation in the early 1970s for the Topology Films Project included the award winning animated films "Space Filling Curves,"[4] showing continuous fractal curves that pass through every point in a square, and "Turning a Sphere Inside Out,"[5] showing how to turn a sphere inside out without tearing or creasing the surface, but allowing the surface to cross itself.
[7] At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1981, he produced the film "Carla's Island"[8] showing reflections of the sunset on ocean waves, using vectorized ray tracing on the Cray 1 supercomputer.