In memoriam: Illuminating our paths — James (Jim) Joseph Thomas

Jim was born in Spokane, WA. He received his Bachelor´s degree in Mathematics from Eastern Washington University and his master´s degree in Computer Science from Washington State University. Jim´s infuence on our feld started in 1971 when he joined the General Motors Research Laboratories. He became a computer graphics researcher and worked on computer graphics systems to support the then new computer-aided design process. In retrospect, this early work and an ACM SIGGRAPH publication on creating interactive graphical systems for CAD foreshadowed Jim´s effort to create new ways to use visualization to understand complex data.