It is with great sadness that G4G notes the death of Ken Knowlton (June 6, 1931 – June 16, 2022).
We are collecting here some recollections from various members of the G4G community. If you have any anecdotes, memories, or tributes that you would like to share, please email us at support@g4gfoundation.org.

– Doug McKenna, Mathemaesthetics
Ken attended a couple of New York Puzzle Parties. Each time he gave fantastic presentations showing his various works. Ken was a talented & kind person.
– Tom Cutrofello
We all know about his fabulous art.
What I did not appreciate was that he had a long and detailed correspondence with Martin Gardner about Philosophy and Magic; and Martin valued his opinion on these matters over the years.
– Dana Richards
Oh, damn, Ken not yet! I’ve known Ken since the dawn of computer graphics. Yet another of the founding greats moves on to the Final Rendering, the Great Teapot in the Sky. It took me 10 years to write my recent book, so the acknowledgments go on and on. Ken just missed being in the portion I titled In Memoriam for those who helped me but didn’t make it to see the result. There are 13 in that select list. I’ll add Ken to that list as an honorary member although, just barely, he did get to see the book. His artistic contribution to it is my favorite piece of his: This Is Not Not a Teapot, one of his classic mosaics, this one of a teapot, made of teapot shards, with obvious meaning to all us computer graphics folks. Let that not not be my tribute to him.
– Alvy Ray Smith

Ken Knowlton, left, and his Bell Labs colleague Leon Harmon. Behind them is the computer-generated artwork they created in the mid-1960s titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” Credit…via Jim Boulton