John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, dies at age 82
John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died
SALT LAKE CITY — John Warnock, who helped invent the PDF and co-founded Adobe Systems, has died. He was 82.
The Silicon Valley entrepreneur and computer scientist died Saturday surrounded by family, Adobe said in a statement. The company didn't give a cause of death or say where Warnock died.
“John’s brilliance and innovations left an indelible mark on Adobe, the technology industry and the world,” Adobe said.
Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way documents are exchanged.
Originally from the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay, Warnock described himself as an average student who later flourished in mathematics.
He earned an undergraduate in math and doctorate in electrical engineering, or computer science, from the University of Utah and maintained close ties with his home state after he retired as CEO of Adobe.
Warnock was the son of a prominent local attorney but was an average student until a teacher at Olympus High School took an interest in him, he told the University of Utah’s alumni magazine, Continuum, in 2013.
“I had an amazing teacher in high school who, essentially, completely turned me around,” Warnock said. “He was really good at getting you to love mathematics, and that’s when I got into it.”
He continued to be a self-described “mediocre” student as he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics and philosophy, but he made a mark while working on his master’s degree.
In 1964, he solved the Jacobson radical, an abstract algebra problem
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