Tilings That Come to Life

2. Planet of the Shapes

Tilings That Come to Life

Tilings don't have to be limited to polygons. Many of the drawings by M.C. Escher, a Dutch artist who lived from 1898 to 1972, contain fascinating tiling patterns with tiles in the shape of birds, fish, reptiles, or other living things.

Graphic artist M.C. Escher created this tiling pattern featuring fish, one of many of his artworks in the collections at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

As a young boy, Escher felt an irresistible urge to fill space neatly with small pieces. Drawing was his favorite subject in school, and after graduating, he became a graphic artist.

At age twenty-four, he visited Spain and discovered the intricate mosaic designs in the Alhambra, a thirteenth-century Moorish palace in Granada. Those designs inspired him to create the amazing tiling patterns that appear in his art.

One of the tiling patterns M.C. Escher viewed and sketched during his 1936 visit to the Alhambra in Spain. Wikipedia.

One person who has studied Escher's art is math professor Doris Schattschneider. While examining Escher's notebooks, Schattschneider found that Escher had worked out his own mathematical system for classifying tilings.

The symbols Escher used described how portions of the edges of a tile related to each other and to edges of adjacent tiles. The system allowed him to find all the different ways in which he could interlock and color various shapes of identical tiles to create pleasing patterns.

"Escher's interest was not in classifying existing patterns, but in learning the rules that governed such patterns so that he could create his own regular divisions of the plane," Schattschneider explained.

Escher's study of geometric shapes, combined with his artistry, was the inspiration for many of his drawings.

Next: The Buckyball Asteroid