![]() For more information about Wing and the series, visit. Schattschneider lectured in the Department of Mathematics as part Escher: Reality and Illusion at the Memorial Art Gallery runs through January 29, 2017. “If you look at some of the works really closely, you’ll just be amazed at what he was doing and how he did it.” You need to go back again and again and look closely,” she says. “It’s very unique art, and it’s the kind of art that you can’t just look at cursorily. Schattschneider continues to lecture extensively about the complexity of Escher’s works. A second edition was released by Harry N. She received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and took a sabbatical from 1988 to 1989 to study Escher’s works at museums in the Netherlands, Washington, D.C, and Connecticut. “I finally figured out that if someone was going to write the book, it had to be me.” “There were some wonderful books about Escher’s graphic works and about his life, but the symmetry work was barely mentioned,” she says. She first presented her photographs at a 1985 conference in Italy, but encountered a shortage of literature regarding the mathematical depth of Escher’s works. The book’s preface mentioned the artist’s notebooks, and Schattschneider was intrigued to learn more about how Escher, who had little mathematical training, was able to create art that incorporated so many geometric principles.ĭuring a trip to The Hague in the Netherlands in 1976, she spent time photographing Escher’s notebooks. One of the books she chose for the class was by crystallographer Carolina MacGillavry, who had collaborated with Escher to use his works to teach geology students about crystallographic patterns. That’s when she encountered Escher’s work for the first time. At Moravian College in Pennsylvania, where she taught for 34 years and is now a professor emerita, she combined her interests early on by designing a course on the mathematics of decorative art. She went on to earn a PhD in mathematics at Yale and was the first female editor of Mathematics Magazine from 1981 to 1985. She enjoyed the challenge of solving problems and devising proofs. To tile the plane, simply translate the tile so that opposite edges match.Īs a student at Rochester in the late 1950s, Schattschneider took many studio art classes, but majored in mathematics because.Translate the two curves to their opposite sides.Reflect that curve in a diagonal of the rhombus that meets one of those endpoints (reflect to replace side b above).Replace one side of the rhombus with a curve that connects the endpoints of the side (side a above).Begin with a rhombus to create a tile with reflection symmetry.“I find her interesting because she’s been able to show how people who don’t think they are looking at or doing mathematics, are doing mathematics.” “Once I heard that an Escher exhibit was coming to the gallery, the idea of bringing in to talk about it in a Wing lecture was obvious,” says Gage, referring to the department’s George Milton Wing lecture series. It’s a message that Michael Gage, the professor of mathematics who invited Schattschneider to Rochester last fall, is eager to spread. Mathematics is really thinking through problems, posing problems, trying to find patterns.” “They are unaware that the majority of mathematics is not that, and in fact, these days, most of that has been relegated to computers. “Most people think math is numbers, formulas, equations, or algorithms,” Schattschneider says. The general public often interprets math in the same way. To him, math was what he encountered in his schoolwork, and consisted of manipulating complicated algebraic formulas and numbers. While Escher consulted mathematicians and scientific publications, he denied he had any mathematical aptitude. Schattschneider notes that many of Escher’s tessellations incorporate the geometric concepts of symmetry, foreground, and background, as well as the moving of shapes using translation, reflection, and rotation. She visited Rochester in November to speak in the Department of Mathematics as well as at the Memorial Art Gallery, in conjunction with the exhibit M. Schattschneider is an authority on geometry in the work of Escher, a Dutch artist best known for creating spatial illusions and tessellations-the tiling of a plane with one or more geometric shapes without gaps or overlaps. Doris Wood Schattschneider ’61, a mathematician, sees a complex combination of art and math. Most people who view the works of 20th-century artist M. 121 (below) uses geometric translation to create a tessellation with two-color symmetry. MATHEMATICAL ILLUSIONS: Escher explored the concepts of infinity and “impossible drawing.” His work Relativity (top) depicts three staircases with people climbing or descending while Fish/Bird No.
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