A Biography of the Pixel

“Alvy Ray Smith is a magician who overturns the visible world and reenvisions everything that happens on a screen. His innovative history of the pixel is remarkable: there are brilliant insights on every page.”

Kevin Kelly, Senior Maverick for Wired Magazine; author of The Inevitable

“We spend half our day staring at a screen, but where do the images on it come from? This engaging, thoroughly researched book by a pioneer of digital image making explains the history, theory, and technology of every image you see through a computer screen.”

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google

“Alvy Ray Smith's authoritative exploration of the history and technology of pixel-based picture making is not only instructive but eminently readable and, indeed, fun!”

Andries Van Dam, Thomas J. Watson Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science at Brown University; coauthor of Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice

“[Smith] lays out a grand unified theory of digital expression. Pixel is a deep and challenging tome in the spirit of Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Br­aid, a winding tale of science, heroes, and tyrants, all leading to the moment, sometime around the beginning of our current century, when a long-­predicted digital convergence coalesced.“

Wired

“Like the pixels that power the imagery all around us, A Biography of the Pixel is a dazzling game of connect-the-dot...to describe what he's written just as a history of computer graphics would be woefully inadequate.”

Fast Company

“We suspect that the digital world is grainier than the real, coarser, more constricted, and stubbornly rectilinear. But this is a prejudice, one that's neatly punctured in A Biography of the Pixel, a new book by electrical engineer Alvy Ray Smith, co-founder of US computer animation studio Pixar. This eccentric work traces the intellectual genealogy of Toy Story (Pixar's first feature-length computer animation in 1995) over bump-maps and around occlusions, through endless samples, computations and transformations, back to the mathematics of the 18th century.”

The Telegraph

"'A Biography of the Pixel' is an essential and pleasant read for all those who regularly engage in a lot of media content: whether you're an avid gamer, a film enthusiast, or simply like to browse the Internet. In fact, if you're aspiring to pursue a career in filmmaking and/or animation, perhaps this book would inspire you further."

E&T Magazine

“Smith reminds us that few great ideas come from the mythical lone genius. Many important innovators and alternative paths tend to be left out of such stories, an issue he tries to correct here.”

ZDNet