Awards
2012 Bézier Award. According to the Solid Modeling Association (SMA), "'Paul de Casltejau's contributions are less widely known than should be the case because he was not able to publish them until equivalent ideas had been reinvented independently by others, sometimes in a rather different form but now recognisably related. Because he was not permitted to publish his early work, we now call polynomials with a Bernstein basis "Bézier polynomials", although Bézier himself did not use control points but their first difference vec- tors as the coefficients. We also call the multilinear polynomials " blossoming", following Lyle Ramshaw who in turn credited de Casteljau with the underlying "polar approach" to the mathematical theory of splines. We do call the algo- rithm for the stable evaluation of the Bernstein-Bezier form for polynomials "de Casteljau algorithm" although it is Carl de Boor's more general result applying it to B-splines which is now widely used in CADCAM systems.
In the words of Pierre Bézier himself: There is no doubt that Citroen was the first company in France that paid attention to CAD, as early as 1958. Paul de Casteljau, a highly gifted mathematician, devised a system based on the use of Berstein polynomials. ... the system devised by de Casteljau was oriented towards translating already existing shapes into patches, defined in terms of numerical data. ... Due to Citroen's policy, the results obtained by de Casteljau were not published until 1974, and this excellent mathematician was deprived of part of the well deserved fame that his discoveries and inventions should have earned him. Pierre Bézier, The first years of CAD/CAM and the UNISURF CAD System," pp 13-26 in Fundamental Developments of Computer- Aided Geometric Modeling, ed L. Piegl, 1993'"
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