mcescher

Maurits Cornelis Escher

I could fill an entire second life with working on my prints. At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.

About

Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 – 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints. He was born in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, as the fourth and youngest son of a civil engineer. After finishing school, he traveled extensively through Italy and Spain pursuing drawing, sketching and experimenting in graphic arts. M.C. Escher became fascinated by the regular Division of the Plane, when he first visited the Alhambra, a fourteen century Moorish castle in Granada, Spain in 1922.

During his lifetime, he made 448 lithographs, woodcuts and wood engravings and over 2000 drawings and sketches. Like some of his famous predecessors, - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer and Holbein -, M.C. Escher was left-handed. Apart from being a graphic artist, M.C. Escher illustrated books, designed tapestries, postage stamps and murals.

Escher's art became popular, both among scientists and mathematicians, and in popular culture. His works has been used in a variety of technical papers and has appeared on the covers of many books and albums. M.C. Escher shows us that reality is wondrous, comprehensible and fascinating.

Mathematics and Science

M.C. Escher's work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher considered that he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, and Harold Coxeter; read mathematical papers by these authors and by the crystallographer Friedrich Haag; and conducted his own original research into tessellation.

Doris Schattschneider identifies 11 strands of mathematical and scientific research anticipated or directly inspired by Escher.

M.C. Escher featured as one of the major inspirations of Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach. In his book, Douglas Hofstadter discussed the ideas of self-reference and strange loops drawing on a wide range of artistic and scientific sources including Escher's art and the music of J. S. Bach.

In 1985, the asteroid 4444 Escher was named in Escher's honor.

References