in the middle of escher’s print gallery is a white circle, and in it his signature. a young man in a gallery looks at a print of a harbour; follow the harbour round, and you reach the gallery he’s standing in. escher drew it on a grid he curved by hand, and stopped short of the middle.
two professors told him he’d drawn a riemann surface. he shrugged it off: riemann is completely beyond me.
in 2000 the mathematician hendrik lenstra saw the print in an airline magazine and worked out how much to shrink the picture, and how far to turn it, to fit it into its own hole:
de smit and lenstra, notices of the ams, 2003
with bart de smit, joost batenburg and two artists, he made the version you are looking at. each turn in, the same picture comes back, 22.58 times smaller and turned 157.6 degrees, for ever, towards a single point in the middle that is never filled: a hole that, unlike escher’s, is too small to notice.
