It is worth first pointing out that the history of surface-based analysis of cortical structure and function predates computer algorithms, and owes much to the pioneering work of people like David Van Essen and Eric Schwartz. David has always been one of the great proponents of “cortical cartography” and his early work with Heather Drury (Drury, 1997; Drury et al., 1996, 1997, 1998) laid the algorithmic foundation for what would become the CARET package for surface-based analysis that is widely used today. Eric, who among other things was both my and Doug Greve's Ph.D. advisor (in fact he mistook us for each other the first day either of us met him), was the first person to recognize the importance of surface-based computer analysis and developed the first computational flattening algorithm (Schwartz, 1990; Schwartz et al., 1989) for generating planar representations of cortical properties. This algorithm is the basis for the one in use in FreeSurfer today both for flattening as well as for regularizing spherical transformation and registration.
