The Compleat Angler

After receiving his Ph.D. from NCSU in 1978, Turner Whitted left for Bell Labs and proceeded to shake the CGI world with an algorithm that could ray-trace a scene in a reasonable amount of time. His film, The Compleat Angler is one of the most mimicked pieces of CGI work ever, as every student that enters the discipline tries to generate a bouncing ray-traced ball sequence.