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[long but worth it]
In the original story, NASA finds a glowing diamond-like structure on the Moon. For various reasons, Kubrick decided to go with something else. They edited the storyboards and put a black rectangle over the diamond. The rectangle was a symbolic TBA. One day they were looking at the boards and realized that the monolith would actually look very cool.
Years later, after thousands of speculations, a fan approaches Arthur C. Clarke and tells Clarke he's unravelled the mystery. The ratio of the rectangle is 1 : 4 : 9; those are the squares of the first three numbers. Clarke liked it so much he used it himself.
If you're a film buff, the book 'The Making of 2001' is a great read.
Have fun