He is well known for his presentations about computer graphics and the steps that people have to go through to learn about careers in that subject. Another person at Pixar with a keen interest in outreach as well as major responsibility for the production of Pixar animations is the CTO, Edwin Catmull .
Computer animation depends on mathematics.
Mathematical modeling techniques develop all of the characters in an animated film, and all of the positions and movements have explicit mathematical descriptions. It is impossible to think of modern computer graphics without at the same time thinking of the mathematics that underlies it. A Simple Java applet will let you experiment with these ideas . To create Geri, Pixar Animation Studios used a fairly novel surface modeling method known as subdivision surfaces . If your refinement rules are constructed properly you can show that in the limit you converge to a smooth surface.