To Create His Geometric Artwork, M.C. Escher Had to Learn Math the Hard Way [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

“It’s rather an amazing story that he did this all on his own,” a mathematician tells us.

BY KAT FRIEDRICH
PUBLISHED: JUL 6, 2023



ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images//Getty Images

Math underlies many of the art pieces M.C. Escher created, because he was fascinated with the idea of depicting infinity in various ways, producing infinitely repeatable patterns known as tessellations, as well as designs that showed an infinite hyperbolic plane—a surface in which every point of the space curves away from itself—mapped onto a circle.

But his success wasn’t due to some natural affinity for math. “He had practically no training in mathematics,” Doris Schattschneider, Ph.D, a mathematics professor emerita at Moravian College, tells Popular Mechanics. “There’s no equations at all that he used. He almost failed his mathematics in high school and never went beyond high school. In fact, he didn’t actually graduate from high school. He failed his final exams.”



The interior of the Moorish Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain.
Getty Images

Escher explored geometry through tessellations, which are mosaics that fit together like puzzles and can fill an entire plane. Schattschneider says his designs featuring tessellations were inspired by his 1922 trip to the Alhambra, an Islamic historic site in Granada, Spain.

“The tilings in the Alhambra are very geometric, very abstract,” Schattschneider says. “He wanted to make tiles that were what he called ‘recognizable shapes.’ He called these motifs.”

More:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a44450386/math-in-mc-escher-art/

You might spot some images by Escher in google images you've not seen, yet. He produced so many!

- click for images -

https://tinyurl.com/3akptk3x