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Have you ever looked closely at a floor made up of tiles? What did you notice about its shapes and designs? You might compare the floor to a tessellation. A tessellation is an arrangement of closed shapes that completely cover an area. Like the tiled floor, the shapes in a tessellation don't overlap, but they fit against each other to create a pattern.
If you've ever seen tessellations in art, you may have seen the work of M. C. Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in Holland in 1898. When he traveled to Spain in 1936, he looked at the Alhambra, the beautiful palace of the Moors, built in the 14th century. The palace is adorned with colorful mosaic designs created by geometric tile shapes. Escher became fascinated with the geometric tile patterns he saw on the Alhambra and began sketching them. He later said that this "was the richest source of inspiration that [he had] ever tapped."
That inspiration led Escher to create tessellations of his own.
He began to draw what he called "metamorphoses," or tessellations
where the shapes changed and interacted with each other. Some of
his most famous works involving tessellations are Sky and Water,
Metamorphose, and Frogs and Fish. In these and his
other tessellations, it's hard to tell where Escher's animals begin
and end. Each of Escher's works is fascinating because it challenges
you to determine the focal point. Often, there is no one specific
focus, but a tiled pattern that seems to go on forever.
M. C. Escher used his talents with geometric patterns and shapes to create drawings, lithographs, and woodcuts. His work is still popular today among art lovers and mathematicians alike, and as you have seen, many teachers use his work to illustrate math in the classroom. But was Escher a mathematician or an artist? Even Escher himself was never quite sure! Is his work art or is it math? Perhaps the best word to describe Escher's work is "interesting."
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