Pierre Bézier, 1910-1999

was an engineer and mathematician who worked for 45 years with the Renault automobile company; he was also Professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers.

In the early days of computer-assisted design in the late 1960s, he conceived a new curve formulation to represent 3D car body forms on computers, which was later adopted as the standard curve of Adobe's PostScript language.

The curves which bear his name are now the basis of most graphics programs, and are used to define most outline fonts.

- notes and links at MyFonts.com

- a 400-word biography from the magazine Computer Aided Design, in Dan Lyke's Flutterby archives

- a drawing made by Prof. Bézier, apparently at the age of 87, "for my friend Brian Barsky"

- there's apparently a web- site called www.bezier.com/pierre.html, but every time I tried to access it, I got the message "connection refused"; do let me know if you have better luck one day.

- someone gave a link to Renault's web-site, but I couldn't find anything about Bézier there. I wrote to ask the company, they were kind enough to reply with details of books, but it seems they misread my question, which was about Prof. Bézier's history with the company, and gave sources about the curves in general ... the reply is here.