The Birthday of Georges Seurat (1859) – Pointillism Mathematics

Seurat invented pointillism – painting with tiny dots of pure colour. The eye blends them (spatial averaging). This is a convolution of the colour field with a point spread function (a Gaussian kernel). The size and spacing of dots create a halftone pattern – a form of spatial dithering. Seurat’s ‘A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte’ used 3.5 million dots. The mathematics of pointillism is now used in digital halftoning for printers and image compression.