Maurits Cornelis Escher (1897-1972), was a Dutch
graphic artist known for his unique and fascinating works of art that
explore and exhibit a wide range of mathematical ideas and geometric
principles: impossible
constructions, explorations of infinity, architecture, and tessellations, mosaics of repetitive designs in which positive and
negative images interconnect and sometimes blend into one another.
Like some of his famous predecessors, -
Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein-, M.C. Escher was
left-handed.
Mathematical mystery in Escher's art examined
March 28, 2007. Source Princeton University,
News@Princenton
A mathematical puzzle in the work of Dutch
graphic artist M.C. Escher is the subject of a lecture by mathematician
Hendrik Lenstra at 8 p.m. Tuesday, April 3, in McCosh 10.
Lenstra, a professor of mathematics at the University of Leiden in the
Netherlands, will speak on "Escher and the Droste Effect," which refers to
the infinite reproduction of an image within an image.
Lenstra has been fascinated with Escher and the mathematical concepts that
many of his lithographs illustrated. In 2000, He focused on Escher's
"Print Gallery," which features a man looking at a distorted picture of
seaside buildings drawn on a twisted grid, with a mysterious blank patch in
the center.
Using elliptic curve theory to describe the distortion necessary to create
the Droste effect in Escher's lithograph, Lenstra arrived at an exact
mathematical formulation of the artist's process. With colleague Bart de
Smit and students, he was able to fill in the patch and generate a complete,
mathematically precise version of the drawing. Lenstra's lecture will
describe this two-year project and show his team's computer variations on
Escher's idea.
