Listening to the BBC In Our Time programme on M.C. Escher brought back happy memories of visiting the Escher in the Palace museum in the Hague, the Netherlands.

A couple of quotes from In Our Time:

.. as metamorphis shows, he said he was moving from landscapes to mindscapes

… and Escher is a beautiful example of the bridges that you can create between the sciences, mathematics, nature, art and music

Escher had difficulty in understanding formal mathematics and at the same time some of his art was very mathematical and showed some patterns that were not fully understood in a formal way at the time.

Escher visited the Alhambra in Granada, Spain and took inspration from the patterns of tiles and other designs. I’ve not been and must go soon!

For more information see:

The Escher foundation website.

Fields Institute post on Donald Coxeter.

Escher in het Paleis post on connection with H.S.M. (Donald) Coxeter.