Biography Of The Pixel

Alvy Ray Smith cofounded Pixar and Altamira Software. He was the first Director of Computer Graphics at Lucasfilm and the first Graphics Fellow at Microsoft. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contribution to digital moviemaking technology.

• Beginnings: A Signal EventFoundations: Three Great Ideas1. Fourier's Frequencies: The Music of the World2. Kotelnikov's Samples: Something from Nothing3. Turing's Computations: Eleventy-Eleven SkydillionContributions: Two High Technologies4. Dawn of Digital Light: The Quickening5. Movies and Animation: Sampling TimeThe Rise and Shine of Digital Light6. Shapes of Things to Come7. Shades of Meaning8. The Millennium and the MovieFinale: The Great Digital Convergence

“[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"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, Engineering and Technology“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 “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