Miller Puckette

An alumnus of St. Andrew's-Sewanee School in Tennessee, Miller Puckette got involved in computer music in 1979 at MIT with Barry Vercoe. In 1979 he became a Putnam Fellow. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1986 after completing an undergraduate degree at MIT in 1980. He was a member of the MIT Media Lab from its opening in 1985 until 1987 before continuing his research at IRCAM, and since 1997 has been a part of the Global Visual Music project. He used Max to complete his first work, which is called Pluton from the second work of Manoury' series called Sonus ex Machina. He is the 2008 SEAMUS Award Recipient. On May 11, 2011, he received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Mons. On July 21, 2012, he received an Honorary Degree from Bath Spa University in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to computer music research. He was the recipient of the Gold Medal at the 1975 Math Olympiads and the Silver Medal at the 1976 Math Olympiads.

Miller Smith Puckette (born 1959) is the associate director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts as well as a professor of music at the University of California, San Diego, where he has been since 1994. Puckette is known for authoring Max, a graphical development environment for music and multimedia synthesis, which he developed while working at IRCAM in the late 1980s. He is also the author of Pure Data (Pd), a real-time performing platform for audio, video and graphical programming language for the creation of interactive computer music and multimedia works, written in the 1990s with input from many others in the computer music and free software communities.