Academy Award-winning software designer

Jonathan Gibbs didn’t get his Oscar for writing code, he got it for creating worlds. The Principia lifer rose from assistant animator to leading Dreamworks’ vaunted visual effects department by taking a holistic approach to his work. “At Principia, you do everything—you embrace the whole person. You’re never pigeonholed.” That attitude enabled him to develop new techniques and software tools the world had never seen. Now at Apple, he’s still creating worlds—writing processes that enable the next generation of artificial intelligence to interpret and interact with the material world in increasingly sophisticated ways. For- tunately, Principia’s “whole-person” is something A.I. can never replace.