Manfred Robert Schroeder

Manfred Robert Schroeder was born in Ahlen, Germany, in 1926. After serving in the German Air Force during the Second World War, where he trained in radar and electronics, he enrolled at the University of Göttingen to study mathematics and physics under the acoustician Erwin Meyer. He received his diploma in 1951 and his doctorate in 1954 for a dissertation on the statistical distribution of acoustic normal modes in enclosures. 

Schroeder began producing computer-generated images in the late 1960s while serving as director of the Acoustics and Speech Research Laboratory at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Working with programmer Suzanne Hanauer, he used a GE-645 computer and Stromberg-Carlson SC-4020 microfilm recorder to generate images that visualized numerical relationships and acoustic principles. His 1968 work One Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words, composed of repeated letters forming the image of a human eye, demonstrated how language and visual perception could be fused through algorithmic logic. Over the following years he developed a series of works that treated mathematical sequences as visual systems, including Computer Moiré and Relative Primzahlen, which explore rhythm, symmetry, and interference through the precision of computation. In these works, equations became image-generating tools, revealing the aesthetic potential of mathematical order and its variations.

Exhibited for the first time in Some More Beginnings—Experiments in Art and Technology at the Brooklyn Museum in 1968, One Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words marked Schroeder’s introduction to the international computer art scene. The work received first prize at the 1969 International Computer Art Competition, bringing recognition to his method of constructing images from mathematical and linguistic code. His computer-generated works were later included in Computer-Kunst: On the Eve of Tomorrow in Hannover and Impulse Computerkunst: Graphik, Plastik, Musik, Film in Munich, alongside early pioneers of digital image-making such as A. Michael Noll, Leon Harmon, and Kenneth Knowlton. Schroeder passed away in 2009.