page_title: M. C. Escher
section_title: In mathematics and science
hierarchical_section_title: M. C. Escher / Legacy / In mathematics and science
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Tegeltableau M.C. Escher aan de buitenmuur van keramiekmuseum Princessehof te Leeuwarden English: Wall tableau of a tessellation by local resident M. C. Escher on the Princessehof ceramic museum, Leeuwarden. The tableau appears to be based on the ink and watercolour Regular Division of the Plane Drawing #47, a study for Verbum, 1942.
context_page_description: Maurits Cornelis Escher was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints.
  Despite wide popular interest, Escher was for long somewhat neglected in the art world, even in his native Netherlands. He was 70 before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the twenty-first century, he became more widely appreciated, with exhibitions across the world.
  His 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 believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose, Harold Coxeter and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.
  Early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks.
context_section_description: Doris Schattschneider identifies eleven strands of mathematical and scientific research anticipated or directly inspired by Escher. These are the classification of regular tilings using the edge relationships of tiles: two-color and two-motif tilings (counterchange symmetry or antisymmetry); color symmetry (in crystallography); metamorphosis or topological change; covering surfaces with symmetric patterns; Escher's algorithm (for generating patterns using decorated squares); creating tile shapes; local versus global definitions of regularity; symmetry of a tiling induced by the symmetry of a tile; orderliness not induced by symmetry groups; the filling of the central void in Escher's lithograph Print Gallery by H. Lenstra and B. de Smit.
  The Pulitzer Prize-winning 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter discusses 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.
  The asteroid 4444 Escher was named in Escher's honor in 1985.
caption: Wall tableau of one of Escher's bird tessellations at the Princessehof Ceramics Museum in Leeuwarden
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