A French car engineer at Renault needed a way to mathematically describe the curves of a car body. What he invented in the 1960s now renders every font on your screen, powers every video game animation, and defines every vector graphic ever made. The wildest part? A rival engineer at Citroën got there first — but corporate secrecy buried his work for decades.
A stunning visual exploration of how Bézier curves actually work — from simple linear interpolation to the elegant recursive algorithm that generates impossibly smooth shapes from just a few control points.
The full mathematical and historical story: from Bernstein polynomials in 1912, through Pierre Bézier's work at Renault in the 1960s, to how these curves quietly power almost every piece of digital design you interact with daily.
While Bézier got the fame, Paul de Casteljau at rival automaker Citroën actually developed the algorithm first — in 1959. But Citroën's obsessive corporate secrecy kept his breakthrough classified for decades. A fascinating story of stolen credit in mathematics.
Bézier spent 42 years at Renault, starting as a tool setter in 1933 and eventually building UNISURF — one of the first CAD systems ever created. His curves shaped literal cars before they shaped the digital world.
A clear technical breakdown of how Bézier curves scale from simple linear paths to the quadratic and cubic variants that define modern typography and animation.
Every letter you're reading right now is defined by Bézier curves. This deep tutorial explains how TrueType uses quadratic curves while PostScript uses cubic ones — and why type designers obsess over the difference.
How Bézier curves define everything from the racing line in Gran Turismo to enemy patrol routes in RPGs. When a guard turns smoothly at a waypoint instead of pivoting robotically, that's Bézier math at work.
A detailed walkthrough of the actual parametric equation that makes it all work. The surprising elegance of how a handful of control points generate infinitely smooth curves.