Conventional wisdom and common practice in acquisition and reconstruction of images or signals from frequency data follows the basic principle of the Nyquist density sampling theory. This principle states that to reconstruct an image/signal, the number of Fourier samples we need to acquire must match the desired resolution of the image/ signal, e.g. the number of pixels in the image. This talk introduces a newly emerged sampling theory which shows that this conventional wisdom is inaccurate. We show that perhaps surprisingly, images or signals of scientific interest can be recovered accurately and sometimes even exactly from a limited number of nonadaptive random measurements. In effect, the talk introduces a theory suggesting ``the possibility of compressed data acquisition protocols which perform as if it were possible to directly acquire just the important information about the image of interest.'' In other words, by collecting a comparably small number of measurements rather than pixel values, one could in principle reconstruct an image with essentially the same resolution as that one would obtain by measuring all the pixels, a phenomenon with far reaching implications. The reconstruction algorithms are very concrete, stable (in the sense that they degrade smoothly as the noise level increases) and practical; in fact, they only involve solving convenient convex optimization programs.