Sumbangan MC Ascher M.C. Escher Interlocking Tiling M.C. Escher has uncommon visions and intuitions.

Many of Escher's drawings contain mathematical ideas never seen elsewhere. One of the things that he did touched me deeply - the interlocking shapes of people, birds and fish which repeat over a flat surface with no gaps. This group of drawings are not his best contribution to mankind, but it is art for me because it stirred my imagination immediately. This is something I can understand as an engineer and I think I can develop these ideas further with computer graphics. The mathematics behind the interlocking shapes on a flat surface was established by Heesch and Kienzle in 1963. The following discussion is limited to regular pattern in a flat surface. The best way to understand Escher's interlocking shapes is to dissect the figures. Take a piece of tracing paper and copy the outline of a shape (in the case of the horseman, the combined outline of the horse and the ri der). This silhouette allows you to focus on the line properties between the shapes. Look in the original periodic drawing and locate the vertices: points where 3 (or more) lines joint together. The vertex is also a place where 3 or more neighboring shapes touch. There are at least 3 vertices and up to 6 vertices on the silhouette on the tracing paper. The line segments between the vertices holds the secrets of the mathematics. Look for rotation symmetry at these vertices. Let's discuss two famous Escher drawings to illustrate the structure: "Reptiles" where the lizards claw out of a book, and "Cycle" where a short person runs down the stairs and tumble into a hexagon form. In these figures, there are 6 vertices and 6 line segments. Upon closer examination, there are only 3 distinct line segments and 2 copies of each of these three lines. Such simplicity ! Now, the secret becomes lucent, half of the silhouette are made out of copies from the other half. Three of the 6 vertices have rotation symmetry C3, which means the line segments attached to these vertices can pivot about this point and radiate out 3 copies like the propeller of an electric fan. The two copies of identical line segments are connected at the rotation vertices C3. The other 3 vertices are the junctions of the dissimilar line segments. The line segments repeat across the page periodically and hook up with other line segments at the vertices to create the repetitive pattern. In all the drawings made by Escher there are 6 different kinds of repetition method for the line segments: translation T, half -turn C2, one-third turn C3, quarter turn C4, one-sixth turn C6 and gliding mirror reflection G. Only 6 different congruent lines and you can do everything ! The lines are equivalent to the sub atomic particles in physics. The atoms are recognized forms which have an interesting meaning to our eyeballs: people, birds, fish, horse, animals. These atomic units may or may not nest on a surface. The molecules are the smallest unit that can interlock - what I call interlocking shapes. The molecules may be a silhouette of a horseman, which interlocks perfectly, and consists of two atoms: the horse and the rider. The atom has meaning to our eyeballs, but no mathematical interpretation. The silhouette, is formed by groups of congruent lines just like a molecule is build with shared orbits of electrons. The method of repetition of the interlocking shapes is rooted in the congruent movements of the lines. Thus, a silhouette that is build with C6 lines also repeat in 60 degree rotations all over the flat surface.

Crystallographers illustrate the molecular packing with regular drawings. These diagrams consists of geometric arrangement with no color or grayscale contrast. The Japanese quilts and Chinese lattice window s are also lacking in color (between adjacent shapes). The Islamic tiles have wonderful colors, which gives the picture depth and foreground/background. All the above still lack another characteristic: recognizable animal form and meaningful objects. The c hallenge Escher overcome is to build the shapes with familiar animals and things. One explanation for the purely abstract shapes in Islamic tile is that the religion forbid the use of familiar recognizable animals and human images. Escher sees the beauty i n structure and infinity. He forced the idea of meaningful lines into the mathematical framework of regular plane division. He likes to challenge the logic of seeing. You can see the white birds and regard the black as background. Or you can see the black fish and regard the white as background. When the mind jumps back and forth, that is when you are seeing two things existing together as interlocking shapes. Escher said that he felt irresistible joy with putting multiple copies of an image on a drawing and making them fit together in a structure. Over a period of 40 years, he gradually learn about the mathematical rules and about techniques used by other cultures, and the science of packing molecules. Within each interlocking shape, half of the boundary is a clone of the other half. These identical sections of the boundary make it possible for neighboring shapes to mate together without gaps. This pre condition often prevents an arbitrary shape from mating together, or it makes a good fitting shape look meaningless (absurd silhouette). Here is another rule, the boundary of a silhouette cannot cross itself. The vertices of Escher's lizard drawing form a regular hexagon. Three of the vertices are rotation points for the 3 pairs of line segments. When you repl ace the straight edges of the hexagon with these curved lines, the lines wind in and out of the hexagon. It is difficult to let the lines come to close proximity (to form the legs of the lizard) and yet never intersect another boundary line. Benoit Mandelb rot stated this as "self avoiding curves" in his discussion of Koch Island. Through 40 year of practice, Escher found a way to mediate the need for the eyeballs to find meaning and beauty, and the need for the mathematical rules to be followed. This is a tension which haunts every student who tries to use these computer programs to draw interlocking shapes. You lack the freedom to draw the clone half of the silhouette. Escher has a wonderful descrip tion of this thinking process in his book "Exploring the Infinite". Here is a direct quote: "A contour line between two interlocking figures has a double function, and the act of tracing such a line therefore presents a special difficulty. On either side o f it, a figure takes shape simultaneously. But, as the human mind can't be busy with two things at the same moment, there must be a quick and continuous jumping from one side to the other. The desire to overcome this fascinating difficulty is perhaps the v ery reason for my continuing activity in this field". Escher's repeating lizards have 4 properties: (1)The drawing is periodic and can extend to infinity. (2) The lizards can rotate 1/3 turn and superimpose on another lizard of a different color. (3) There are no gaps between the adjacent lizards, so the tiles interlock. (4)There is only one tile with 3 different colors. The first 2 aspects are symmetry properties of the aggregate. The 3rd and 4th are properties of the tile boundary (line segments of the tile). The study of symmetry in crystallography give rise to the 17 wallpaper groups. There is an international notation (IUC) which describes pattern properties such as m(mirror), g(gliding mirror), p1(translation).

Many people said the mathematics of symme try describes the properties of Escher drawings. But the 3rd and 4th properties are missing from the "Wallpaper groups" which is based on aggregates and not tiles. A tile is an enclosure of finite area. There is a close relationship between the tile symmet ry and the aggregate symmetry. Robert Fathauer remarked to me that all tilings are patterns, but a patterns is not necessary a tile. A pattern(aggregate) may not have boundary or enclosure or finite size. Most people interested in Escher -like drawings want to design tiles by a step-by-step cookbook method. The mathematics guides and restricts design, but the mathematics will not replace vision. This is why so few interlocking shapes have ever been designed successfully. Heesch studied tile properties and de fined 28 basic tile formation based on line segments. Here we have moved one level down and talk about movements of the line segments. The tile itself is an assembly of 3 to 6 line segments which always come in pairs. Computer programs are available that speed up the design of such tiles and patterns using the mathematics of symmetry. Now let us look at how the pattern repeats to infinity. Each regular pattern has tile properties and cluster properties. The tile, which is similar to a molecule, may repeat in rotation, translation and gliding mirror. We can build a cluster of molecules, similar to a small crystal that repeats only in translation. If you take the Escher example of the lizard and the tumbling man, a cluster consist of one of each color lizard (3 in the cluster). This cluster can shed all rotation and reproduce by translation. Linear translation is one of the easiest things for the computer to do: increment the x and y co-ordinates by the period. These cluster contains 1 to 6 molecules. There ar e at least 2 translation axes and sometimes 3 translation axes. Doing tessellation with JAVA program means finding a cluster of lines or polygons and the shift vectors for this group. Usually, a x-vector is used to repeat the shape from left to right. The second vector may be at 60 degrees to x-vector when the next row has an offset in the x-direction. This offset is typically half the regular x displacement. To make a webpage wallpaper, the two vectors must be orthogonal (perpendicular). The x and y vectors must have units equal to the number of pixels in the width and height of the GIF or JPEG file. This is done by regrouping the cluster, cut some off a shape and patch that onto the other side. As Hop David said "If you want the tiles to appear seamless, take care that the left side matches the right side and that the top matches the bottom." The wallpaper tiles are straightly rectangular. Once you have the tile, to activate this tile on the webpage is easy, because HTML has a build -in tiling function in BODY statement with the parameter "BACKGROUND=catcat3.gif". It is interesting to look for the cluster in the JAVA graphics examples. Let's summarize the mathematics. The lines are congruent and composed of an array of pixels. The forms make sense to the eye but has no mathematical significance. The tile is the interlocking shape and may be composed of several sub divisions which are recognizable forms. Clusters of 1-6 tiles can form a translational repeating unit. For this translational unit to be suitable for wallpaper on a webpage, make sure that the tile is rectangular and the two axes of repetition are same as the width and height of the tile. Engineers have used interlocking shapes to conserve materials in stamping . The links and references at the bottom of this page will show many uses of tessellation in different art and science professions.

I developed a set of computer programs at the University of Illinois using the above mathematics. In 1978, the programs were used for students to drawing Escher -like designs. People interested in this kind of work can check the technical papers."Automatic Generation of Interlocking Shapes" Computer Graphics and Image Processing April 1979, Volume 9, Number 4, pp. 333 -353."Interlocking Shapes in Art and Engineering" Computer Aided Design, January 1980, Volume 12 Number 1, pp.29-34. These journals can be found in engineering libraries at major universities.

Wikipedia Escher's first print of an impossible reality was Still Life and Street , 1937. His artistic expression was created from images in his mind, rather than directly from observations and travels to other countries. Well known examples of his work also include Drawing Hands, a work in which two hands are shown, each drawing the other; Sky and Water, in which light plays on shadow to morph the water background behind fish figures into bird figures on a sk y background; and Ascending and Descending, in which lines of people ascend and descend stairs in an infinite loop, on a construction which is impossible to b uild and possible to draw only by taking advantage ofquirks of perception and perspective. He worked primarily in the media of lithographs and woodcuts, though the few mezzotints he made are considered to be masterpieces of the technique. In his graphic art, he portrayed mathematical relationships among shapes, figures and space. Additionally, he explored interlocking figures using black and white to enhance different dimensions. Integrated into his prints were mirror images of cones, spheres, cubes, rings and spirals. In addition to sketching landscape and nature in his early years, he also sketched insects, which frequently appeared in his later work. His first artistic work, completed in 1922, featured eight human heads divided in different planes. Later around 1924, he lost interest in "regular division" of planes, and turned to sketching landscapes in Italy with irregular perspectives that are impossible in natural form.

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incorporation of t ree-di ensional objects such as spheres, columns and cubes into his orks. or example, in a print called eptiles", he combined t o and three dimensional images. In one of his papers, Escher emphasi ed the importance of dimensionalit and described himself as "irritated" by flat shapes: "I make them come out of the plane."

Waterfall,

Sculpture of the small stellated dodecahedronthat appears in Escher's Gravitation. It can be found in front of the "Mesa+" building on the ampus of the ente ni ersity. Escher also studied the mathematical concepts of topology. e learned additional concepts in mathematics from the British mathematician oger Penrose. rom this knowledge he created Waterfall and Up and own, featuring irregular perspecti es similar to the concept of the Mbius strip.

Escher printed Meta or

designs that told a story through the use of pictures. These works demonstrated a culmination of Escher's skills to incorporate mathematics into art. In Meta or osis I, he transformedconvex polygons into regular patterns in a plane to form a human motif. This effect symbolizes his change of interest from landscape and nature to regular division of a pl ane. One of his most notable works is the piece Meta or

osis III, which is wide enough

to cover all the walls in a room, and then loop back onto itself. After 1953, Escher became a lecturer at many organizations. A planned series of lectures in North America in 1962 was cancelled due to an illness, but the illustrations and text for the lectures, wr itten out in full by Escher, were later published as part of the book Esc er on Esc er. In July 1969 he finished his last work, a woodcut called Snakes, in which snakes wind through a pattern of linked rings which fade to infinity toward both the center and the edge of a circle.

Over his life, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher created over a hundred ingenious tesselations in the plane. Some were simple and geometric, used as prototypes for more complex endeavors. But in most the tiles were recognizable animal forms such as birds, fish and reptiles. The definitive reference on Escher's divisions of the plane is Doris Schattschneider's Visions of Symmetry, now in a second edition. A good place to view some of Escher's work online is the World of Escher. Be sure also to check out these examples from Escher's notebook: E25, E70, and E72. Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination. Can we automate the discovery of tilings by recognizable motifs? More formally, we pose the Escherization problem: Given a shape S, find a new shape T such that: 1. T is as close as possible to S; and 2. Copies of T fit together to form a tiling of the plane. We have developed an algorithm that can produce reasonable solutions to the Escherization problem. It is based on three large components:


A parameterized space of tilings. We develop a parameterization of the space of isohedraltilings, a family of tilings that can express the designs Escher created. Every possible tile shape boils down to a sequence of real numbers. An interactive tool lets us modif y these numbers in a natural way (corresponding to Escher manipulating drawings by hand). More

 

 

 

osis I in 1937, which was a beginning part of a series of

importantly, we can direct the computer to search through possible sequences of numbers, trying to find good tilings by brute force. A comparison function for shapes. We can dial up a collection of tile shapes using the parameterization above. We need to know how well each of these tiles approximates the goal shape provided by the user. We use a metric from the computer vision literature that efficiently finds the L2distance between two polygons. Our objective then becomes to locate the particular tile shape that compares most favourably to the goal shape. An optimization algorithm. We need a meaningful strategy for sorting through the large shape of possible tile shapes for the best one (the one that's closest to the goal shape). We use a simulated annealing algorithm from Numerical Recipes. When suitably tuned, it tends to find good tile shapes without getting stuck in objectionable local minima.

Dihedral Escherization


Escher also created a number of dihedral tilings: designs featuring two different shapes. He was fond of these designs, since with more than one shape it was possible to tell a story, to have the shapes complement each other somehow. The Escherization problem can be adapted in an obvious way to two goal shapes. We can also extend the space of tilings by including in the parameterization a path that splits an isohedral tile shape into two pieces. We compare the two pieces to the goal shapes and run the optimization as before, attempting to minimize the maximum of the two comparisons. Dihedral Escherization can also be exploited to create designs in the style of Escher's Sky and Water. We need to restrict the search to a narrower class of possible tiling types (what Dress calls Heaven and Hell Patterns ). Once the desired tiling has been discovered the rest of the process is fairly easy, since we already have an association between a realistic, user-supplied goal shape and an abstract, more geometric tile shape. We just need to morph between those two extremes. Here's one example, based on Rembrandt and Mrs. van Rijn above.

Aperiodic Escherization


The Penrose tilings P2 (kites and darts) and P3 (thin and thick rhombs) can also be parameterized and fed to the Escherization system. It's much harder to discover satisfying results, because of the idiosyncratic shapes of the Penrose tiles. It's exciting to be able to produce these aperiodic pictures Penrose and Escher were friends, but sadly Escher passed away before Penrose discovered P2 and P3. Penrose has asked what sorts of designs Escher would have been able to create from these tilings.

Non-Euclidean Escherization


Escher made four wonderful Circle Limit patterns, designs based on nonEuclidean geometry. Escher didn't have the mathematical background to manipulate hyperbolic patterns symbolically, but he certainly had the intuition necessary to create pictures of them. Our Escherization algorithm cannot easily be translated into non-Euclidean geometry, for deep reasons having to do with the notion of shape, as used in the shape comparison metric. However, for some isohedral tiling types it is possible to transfer the output of Escherization from the Euclidean plane to the hyperbolic plane or to the surface of a sphere. The process is a kind of non-linear warp of a piece of the Escherized tiling.