Christopher Horvath started his visual effects career in Sydney, moving to Industrial Light & Magic in 1997, then co-founding Tweak Films with Richard Kerris. His concentration on physical simulations, particularly of water, took him to Weta Digital in New Zealand and later to Pixar Animation Studios. He received an Academy Award in 2024 for his contribution to the Alembic file format.

In the technology industry, Christopher was the first external hire for Google’s ill-fated “Replicant” robotics effort, a member of the Social VR team at Facebook (also ill-fated), and the head of the NPC-AI simulation department at Cruise (also ill-fated). He foolishly turned down a chance to work on the Vision Pro at Apple (conspicuously not ill-fated), and has doubted his sanity ever since.

Since joining Nvidia, he has been working on adapting production-scale, high-quality physics solvers to the GPU. With Eric Shi, the Houndstooth GPU fluid solver was able to compute a 1.8 billion particle fluid simulation on 64 GPUs over 8 nodes. Adapting this solver to work with Warp and NanoVDB and to be nicely wrapped in Python has been a full-time job for some time.

At some point in the recent past, Christopher became enamored with the very ancient APL programming language. He is convinced that a modern reimagining of it, using emoji instead of APL’s special symbols, is a plausible and achievable path to hyper-concise executable poetry that can describe the motion of Earth, Wind and Fire (and of course Water).