I photographed the 1023 incoming freshmen from the roof of the campus center. So I figured there was no better way to represent the almost 32 squared students of mathematically inclined students as a 32×32 grid of pixels. Since the original group of students did not form a perfect square, I chose a 16×64 rectangle marquee in Photoshop and selected as many people as I could. I then down sampled to 16×64 pixels, allowing the program to average the surrounding colors, then uprezed (nearest neighbor method) to a size appropriate for viewing here. Finally, I cut the rectangle in half, moved the left half directly above the right half, and made the bottom right “pixel” transparent (1023 students after all—not 1024) and saved as a 24 bit png to preserve colors and transparency.
Is it art? I doubt it. Is it nerdy? Appropriately yes!
