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This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
 | This article relies on a single source. (October 2022) |
| Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. | |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer animation |
| Founded | 1966 |
| Founder | Dr. Philip Mittelman |
| Defunct | 1985 |
| Fate | Merged into Blue Sky Studios |
| Successor | Blue Sky Studios |
Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/SynthaVision or MAGI Animation Studios) was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. By modeling structures using combinatorial geometry mathematics and applying Monte Carlo radiation ray tracing techniques, the mathematicians could estimate exposures at various distances and relative locations in and around fictional structures. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at MAGI by Robert Goldstein.
It was one of four companies hired to create the 3-D computer animation for the 1982 film Tron. MAGI was responsible for most of the CGI animation in the first half of Tron, while Triple-I worked mainly on the second half of the film. MAGi modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.
MAGI developed a software program called SynthaVision to create CGI images and films. SynthaVision was one of the first systems to implement a ray tracing algorithmic approach to hidden surface removal in rendering images. The software was a constructive solid geometry (CSG) system, in that the geometry was solid primitives with combinatorial operators (such as Boolean operators).
SynthaVision's modeling method does not use polygons or wireframe meshes that most CGI companies use today. The combination of the solid modeling and ray tracing (later to become plane firing) made it a very robust system that could generate high-quality images.
MAGi created the world's first CGI advertisement for IBM, featuring 3-D letters that flew out of an office machine.
In 1972, MAGI/SynthaVision was started by Robert Goldstein, with Bo Gehring and Larry Elin covering the design and film/television interests, respectively.
Two of the first television commercial applications were storyboarded by Texas artist, Gordon Blocker in 1973-4 for the Texas Commerce Bank "Flag Card" commercial and a news open for KHOU-TV (CBS) in Houston, Texas.
From 1973 until 1981, Bo Gehring, Larry Elin, Jack Heyl, Nancy Hunter Campi and Chris Wedge were hired at various times and used the SynthaVision animation system to create television graphics and educational and industrial films for clients. The demo reels spanning these years can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/218835904
In 1981, MAGI was hired by Disney to create half of the majority of the 20 minutes of CGI needed for the film Tron. Twenty minutes of CGI animation, in the early 1980s, was extremely gutsy, and so MAGi was a portion of the CGI animation, while other companies were hired to do the other animation shots. Since SynthaVision was easy to animate and could create fluid motion and movement, MAGI was assigned with most of Tron's action sequences. These classic scenes include the light cycle sequence and Clu's tank and recognizer pursuit scene. Despite the high-quality images that SynthaVision was able to create, the CSG solid modeling could not create anything with complex shapes and multiple curves, so simpler objects like the light cycles and tanks were assigned to MAGI. MAGI was given $1.2 million to finance the animation needed for Tron. MAGI needed more R&D and many other engineers who were working in government contracts at MAGI were assigned into MAGI's "SynthaVision" division.
MAGI sped up the process of supplying its work to Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California by a transcontinental computer hook-up. Before each scene was finalized in MAGI's lab in Elmsford, New York, it was previewed on a computer monitor at Disney. Corrections could then be made in the scene immediately. Previously, the only way of previewing the scene was to film it, ship it to Burbank, get corrections made, ship it back to Elmsford, and continue this "ping-ponging" until the scene was correct. The computer link is cut between two-and-a-half to five days from the creation of each scene.[3]
During the production of Tron, animators and computer image choreographers Bill Kroyer and Jerry Rees invited John Lasseter (who would later co-found Pixar) to see some of the light cycle animation. Lasseter said in "The Making of Tron" featurette that the light cycle animation was the first CGI animation he had ever seen.
MAGI’s work on Tron inspired more work from advertising agencies. In 1982, MAGI won the very first Clio award for computer animation for a commercial it created called “Worm War 1” for Atari video games. Many more projects for major ad agencies and clients followed.
In 1983, Disney commissioned MAGI to create a test film featuring characters from the children's book Where the Wild Things Are. The Wild Things test used CGI animation for the backgrounds and traditional 2-D animation for the characters "Max" and his dog. Animators John Lasseter and Glen Keane of Disney directed the test for Disney. At MAGi, Larry Elin directed Chris Wedge and Jan Carle and produced a 3-D background pencil test based on Disney's story animatics. Lasseter and Keane at Disney then hand-animated over the CGI background wireframes. A tight bi-coastal production loop was designed. MAGI programmer Josh Pines developed film scanning software to digitize and clean up the final hand-drawn character film footage from Disney. The scanning software was adapted to produce cleaner digitized images. Concurrently, an ink and paint system was written by Christine Chang, Jodi Slater, and Ken Perlin for production. This early paint system filled in color within character line borders, applied shadow, and highlighted and applied a blur to the color areas to produce an airbrush 2.5D effect. The final painted characters and CGI-rendered backgrounds were digitally composited, color-corrected, and light-scanned back onto film with a Celco camera for lab processing and delivery back to Disney.
In 1984, MAGI opened an office in Los Angeles, California, headed by Richard Taylor, who worked as visual effects supervisor on Tron. Taylor, Wedge, and Carlee directed a test for a Disney film Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the software and computing hardware proved insufficient for the proposed animation and visual effects. The Los Angeles office was closed shortly after its establishment.
Also in 1984, Michael Ferraro and Tom Bisogno began production on a short film, “First Flight”, for the SIGGRAPH '84 Electronic Theater. To achieve organic textures such as clouds, water, and bark, they made use of a programming language called KPL that Ken Perlin had been developing, which was designed to run a full computer program at every pixel of an image. KPL was the first example of a general purpose procedural shader language,[4][5] a concept which was subsequently adopted by Pixar for its Pixar RenderMan platform, and which eventually led to the development of the modern graphics processing unit (GPU). Perlin noise was also created by Ken Perlin as a built-in function within KPL.
Much of the MAGI/SynthaVision software was Fortran-based, with a Ratfor interface for the artists. In 1985, Josh Pines argued to use the Unix programming environment for any future software and production programming design.
Soon after, the SynthaVision software was sold to Lockheed's (CADAM) division as the foundation of ISD (Interactive Solids Design), and MAGi was formally sold to a Canadian firm, Vidmax (which later went defunct); many of the employees left for other CGI companies and universities.
Phillip Mittelman, the founder of MAGi, died in December 1999.
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (a.k.a. MAGI or MAGI/SynthaVision or MAGI Animation Studios) was an early computer technology company founded in 1966 by Dr. Philip Mittelman and located in Elmsford, New York, where it was evaluating nuclear radiation exposure. By modeling structures using combinatorial geometry mathematics and applying Monte Carlo radiation ray tracing techniques, the mathematicians could estimate exposures at various distances and relative locations in and around fictional structures. In 1972, the graphics group called MAGI/SynthaVision was formed at MAGI by Robert Goldstein. It was one of four companies hired to create the 3-D computer animation for the 1982 film Tron. MAGI was responsible for most of the CGI animation in the first half of Tron, while Triple-I worked mainly on the second half of the film. MAGi modeled and animated the light cycles, recognizers and tanks.
Blue Sky Studios, Inc. was an American visual effects and computer animation studio, which was based in Greenwich, Connecticut. It was founded on February 22, 1987 by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their employer, Mathematical Applications Group (MAGI), one of the visual effects studios behind Tron (1982), got sold to Vidmax Canada and eventually closed. Using its in-house rendering software, the studio created visual effects for commercials and films before dedicating itself to animated film production. It produced 13 feature films, the first being Ice Age (2002) and the final one being Spies in Disguise (2019). Blue Sky Studios became a subsidiary of 20th Century Animation in 1997 through its VIFX division's majority-stake acquisition of the studio and became the principal animation studio of 20th Century Fox from 2002 until its acquisition by the Walt Disney Company, as part of their acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets in 2019. Disney closed down Blue Sky on 10 April 2021 and absorbed its library and IPs into 20th Century Animation. Ice Age and Rio were the studio's most commercially successful franchises, while Robots (2005), Horton Hears a Who! (2008), The Peanuts Movie (2015), and the aforementioned Spies in Disguise were among its most critically praised films. Scrat, a character from the Ice Age franchise, was the studio's mascot.
Mathematical chemistry is the area of research engaged in novel applications of mathematics to chemistry; it concerns itself principally with the mathematical modeling of chemical phenomena. Mathematical chemistry has also sometimes been called computer chemistry, but should not be confused with computational chemistry. Major areas of research in mathematical chemistry include chemical graph theory, which deals with topology such as the mathematical study of isomerism and the development of topological descriptors or indices which find application in quantitative structure-property relationships; and chemical aspects of group theory, which finds applications in stereochemistry and quantum chemistry. Another important area is molecular knot theory and circuit topology that describe the topology of folded linear molecules such as proteins and nucleic acids. The history of the approach may be traced back to the 19th century. Georg Helm published a treatise titled "The Principles of Mathematical Chemistry: The Energetics of Chemical Phenomena" in 1894. Some of the more contemporary periodical publications specializing in the field are MATCH Communications in Mathematical and in Computer Chemistry, first published in 1975, and the Journal of Mathematical Chemistry, first published in 1987. In 1986 a series of annual conferences MATH/CHEM/COMP taking place in Dubrovnik was initiated by the late Ante Graovac. The basic models for mathematical chemistry are molecular graph and topological index. In 2005 the International Academy of Mathematical Chemistry (IAMC) was founded in Dubrovnik (Croatia) by Milan Randić. The Academy has 82 members (2009) from all over the world, including six scientists awarded with a Nobel Prize.
The mathematical sciences are a group of areas of study that includes, in addition to mathematics, those academic disciplines that are primarily mathematical in nature but may not be universally considered subfields of mathematics proper. Statistics, for example, is mathematical in its methods but grew out of bureaucratic and scientific observations, which merged with inverse probability and then grew through applications in some areas of physics, biometrics, and the social sciences to become its own separate, though closely allied, field. Theoretical astronomy, theoretical physics, theoretical and applied mechanics, continuum mechanics, mathematical chemistry, actuarial science, computer science, computational science, data science, operations research, quantitative biology, control theory, econometrics, geophysics and mathematical geosciences are likewise other fields often considered part of the mathematical sciences. Some institutions offer degrees in mathematical sciences (e.g. the United States Military Academy, Stanford University, and University of Khartoum) or applied mathematical sciences (for example, the University of Rhode Island).
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
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