Thanks to Gus Mueller (master of "Flying Meat" and creator of Acorn and VoodooPad and FlySketch) I learned about this absolutely fabulous interactive site explaining the math and geometry behind Bezier curves ... which are the fundamental building blocks for drawing nice smooth curves in digital graphics. If you are at all interested, check it out!

BTW, the interactivity and math typesetting is all done without any plugins ... just using standard HTML5 and JavaScript ... IE people need to be running IE 9, but everyone else just needs to be using the current version of their browser.

A primer on Bezier curves - by Mike "Pomax" Kamermans

Last updated: 2 November, 2011

Before we begin I'd like to say that all the graphics on the page, except for the Wolfram Alpha images, are interactive graphics, without requiring any special browser plugins. If your browser supports javascript, and the canvas element (sorry IE8 users, you'll have to upgrade to IE9, which supports <canvas> - Get it here,) it will be able to let you use this page, thanks to the most excellent Processing.js project. You will also see rather nicely typeset mathematics, thanks to the equally excellent MathJax library.

So, with that out of the way, let's look at the topic at hand: Bezier curves.