The M.C. Escher Odyssey begins!

M.C. Escher: Eight Heads, 1922

As you likely know, this semester I am on sabbatical. For those of you who are not part of academia, sabbaticals are granted to allow faculty to have a time away from normal teaching to pursue new research, teaching ideas, and engage in creative endeavors. In the past few years I have become very interested in mathematical tilings (essentially how we can subdivide the plane) and writing software to allow anyone to explore tilings. During my sabbatical, I am gaining expertise in this area to help my research. I am also developing a new course on mathematics, computing, and the arts.

One of the people who created very unique tilings was the dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher. I have enjoyed Escher's artwork for many years. You can see some of his works in the gallery at www.mcescher.com. Escher was a pioneer in creating tessellations of interlocking repeated animal shapes. He was not a mathematician, but many of his artworks contain mathematical themes. If you are interested, you can read a recent article by Escher expert and mathematician Doris Schattschneider at www.ams.org/notices/201006/rtx100600706p.pdf. She also wrote a very comprehensive book about Escher about 20 years ago.

The woodcut Eight Heads (above) was one of Escher's first explorations into tiling and he did not return to do any significant work in this area until 1936, after visiting southern Spain. During his trip, Escher toured Moorish ruins with elaborate tilings in Granada, Seville, and Cordoba. While not readily apparent, copies of the Eight Heads block shown above can be used to tile the plane! In fact, this is an example the simplest of all tessellations where copies of an underlying block or tile are simply translated left, right, up, and down. A snippet of the tessellation is shown below. Did you find all eight different heads?


What about the odyssey? I am traveling to the Netherlands to visit the Escher Museum, the library and archives of the Gemeentemuseum, and several places where there are public Escher works on display. I then travel in Escher's footsteps to Spain to see the Alhambra in Granada, the Alcazar in Seville, and the Mezquita in Cordoba.

I am very lucky that my trusty assistant and wife, who has vast knowledge of art history and significant archives experience, is able to come along! Amy will be of great help as I explore the works of M.C. Escher and see the Moorish sites that inspired his work on tessellations.

As with our trip last summer, we have hotel reservations and plane tickets, but we still need train and bus tickets. We also need to get tickets to museums. I have most major details planned and we are looking forward to an awesome trip! Today we fly from Detroit to Philadelphia and then on to Amsterdam. The weather in Amsterdam is likely to be cool, but southern Spain is likely to be sunny and 80.