In fact, while searching for these interesting problems for my students, I have come across some results that were apparently unknown. This is the good luck I referred to earlier. We did this exercise in Mathematics and Art because from this simple concept we obtain a mathematical description of perspective. In turn, this perspective allowed us to derive and more importantly understand, the perspective drawing tricks commonly used by artists. We also drew using a coordinate transformation approach and, of all things, Microsoft Excel.
Fractal geometry is fairly well-known, at least in name.
For us the important thing was that trees, bushes, clouds, mountains, rivers, lightning, galaxies, snowflakes and a host of other natural forms could be drawn convincingly using fractal geometry. Through our work in Mathematics and Art we were able to present strong circumstantial evidence that Japanese woodblock artists of the 19 th century routinely incorporated fractal shapes in their work. I realized that its graph had a kind of self-similarity connected with fractal geometry. After submitting this article, I realized further that the graph was an authentic example of anamorphic art, a type of perspective trickery introduced by painters near the end of the 15 th Century. Again I realized the value of the Mathematics and Art course to my own work after staring up at telephone poles one day and thinking about their perspective representations.