M. C. Escher - Home

Maurits Cornelis Escher (17 June 1898 - 27 March 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who made woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, many of which were inspired by mathematics. Despite wide popular interest, Escher was neglected in the art world for most of his life, even in his native homeland of The Netherlands. He was 70 years old before a retrospective exhibition was held. In the late twentieth century, he became more widely appreciated, and in the twenty-first century, he has been celebrated in exhibitions around the world.

His work features mathematical objects and operations including impossible objects, explorations of infinity, reflection, symmetry, perspective, truncated and stellated polyhedra, hyperbolic geometry, and tessellations. Although Escher believed he had no mathematical ability, he interacted with the mathematicians George Pólya, Roger Penrose and Harold Coxeter and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, and conducted his own research into tessellation.