I have billions of pixels in my cellphone, and you probably do too. But what is a pixel? Why do so many people think that pixels are little abutting squares?
The world is made of pixels
When we hear “pixel”,
most of us picture this:
But those tiny squares, are a myth.
It’s where digital instructions become visible, where
code becomes color.
Each pixel is defined by its position and color value:
A coordinate on the screen telling the display how to shine.
The story of pixels begins centuries ago with Joseph Fourier during the
French Revolution — a pioneer who revealed how complex signals can be
broken into simple waves.
Fast forward to the year 2000 —
the turn of the millennium — which marked an uncelebrated event known as
the Great Digital Convergence. At that moment, all old analogue media
merged into one digital medium.
1790
Born in Auxerre
1768
Arrested during Revolution
1794
Egypt with Napoleon
1798
Exit in Grenoble
1802
Fourier Series published
1822
Vladimir Kotelnikov, a Russian engineer and mathematician, built on Fourier’s wave theory…
… and made it digital.
We can ignore everything between the dots, and still not lose any
information.
Each dot holds enough to rebuild the whole wave.
This is the true pixel.
A tiny, invisible point.
No square,
No shape,
Just information.
We never see the real pixels.We see their illusion, shaped by screens,
grids, and graphics.
But underneath, it’s just math, light, and imagination.
From cellphone photos to VR and video games, pixels are the foundation
of modern digital visuals. As the article puts it,
What had been ink and paper, photographs, movies, and television
became, in a blink, just pixels.
2025