Many applications require light to be spatially shaped or rearranged. A simple example would be a microscope that uses a sequence of lenses to magnify an image. However it is also possible to use more complicated optics to perform more sophisticated transformations. Whatever the application, be it telecommunications, imaging, advanced manufacturing, high-power lasers, or investigations of fundamental phenomena. You often have a light beam coming from your input source (or sources), which must be transformed into a different shape for delivery to the output target plane. We use computer algorithms to design new optical systems that can implement novel spatial transformations. Often using a sequence of pixelated glass plates of varying pixel-by-pixel thickness.