As a brilliant Israeli-born math student at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology during the 1960s, Danny Cohen was known
as a force of nature. And when he learned that Ivan Sutherland,
the inventor of the seminal Sketchpad computer interface system,
was teaching a small graduate seminar on computer graphics at
Harvard, he was determined to take the course. “At that time the
way you got into courses like that was that Harvard had a quaint
little phrase, ‘admission by consent of the instructor,’”
recalled Robert F. Sproull, a computer scientist who was a
Harvard student at the time. “Danny had shown up and we all
figured that Ivan had consented, but later we learned, according
to Ivan, it was more like relented.” The Israeli math prodigy
would go on to become a graduate student with Dr. Sutherland,
with whom he designed the first computerized flight simulation
system, pioneering the software technique for hiding visual
surfaces from view. After earning his doctorate he joined the
Harvard computer science f