According to Ivan Sutherland, Ph.D., Sun fellow and vice president, Sun Microsystems, "A powerful way to handle complex design problems involves dividing them into smaller ones with limited scope." For Sutherland, good engineering involves careful description of the smaller parts and even more careful description of the interfaces between them. "Between such parts, interfaces define the possible communications," he said. Sutherland will cite examples drawn from computer programming, hardware design, mechanical engineering and life.

Sutherland has worked with computers since the 1950s, when he wrote a program that enabled a mechanical computer, SIMON, to perform the mathematical operation of division. He has been a pioneer in the fields of computer graphics, robotics, intergrated circuit design, and head-mounted displays that anticipated today's virtual reality systems. He is currently investigating asynchronous systems.

Sutherland earned a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), an M.S. from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a member of both the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences.