Beyond Escher: The Art Of Tesselation Revealed
One of the heroes of 20th century graphic art was Maurits Cornelis Escher, who used concepts from mathematics to produce extraordinary images.

One device that Escher mastered was the tesselation, which he exploited to create fantastic, periodic arrangements of images.
Today, San Le, an artist and computer programmer based in the US, shows how to generalise Escher’s technique. And his approach is so simple that anyone can give it try. “The rules to creating tiling art are straightforward,” says Le.
The idea is to study the shapes that fit together to tile a plane and to clearly label the sides that end up being adjacent. It’s then a question of creating an image that connects across these complementary sides.
The beauty of this approach is that it changes the problem from a mathematical challenge to an artistic one.
To demonstrate the power of his method, Le goes a step further than Escher by applying it to Penrose’s aperiodic tiling of a plane using darts and kites (shown above). That’s a tiling Escher never had the chance to work with but one that he would surely approve of. See below for Le’s version.
Le even goes on to show how to create fractal tilings, surely in a manner that Escher would approve of.
The results are mesmerising (see the paper for more examples). Why not give it try?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1106.2750: The Art of Space Filling in Penrose Tilings and Fractals


Keep Reading
Most Popular

A quick guide to the most important AI law you’ve never heard of
The European Union is planning new legislation aimed at curbing the worst harms associated with artificial intelligence.

It will soon be easy for self-driving cars to hide in plain sight. We shouldn’t let them.
If they ever hit our roads for real, other drivers need to know exactly what they are.

This is the first image of the black hole at the center of our galaxy
The stunning image was made possible by linking eight existing radio observatories across the globe.

The gene-edited pig heart given to a dying patient was infected with a pig virus
The first transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart into a human may have ended prematurely because of a well-known—and avoidable—risk.
Stay connected

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.