Maurits Cornelis Escher (Leeuwarden, 17 /06/1898 Laren, 27/03/1972)
The Mathematical Art Of M.C. Escher (BBC-4, A Night of Numbers)
The Dutch artist M.C. Escher is best known for his often mesmerising geometrical images whose playfulness obscures a sophisticated grasp of mathematical theory. Dreaming the Impossible looks at the remarkable career and mathematical inspirations of this remarkable artist. M. C. Escher, born 6.17.1898, was a Dutch graphic artist known worldwide for his mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints that feature impossible constructions, exploration of infinity, architecture, and tessellations of the euclidean and hyperbolic plane. Of all major artists of the 20th Century, none was more influenced by maths than the Dutch artist MC Escher. Throughout his career, this superb draughtsman produced images that explored (and exploited) mathematical ideas.
BBC FOUR celebrated mathematics and the beauty of numbers with a series of programmes about this most precise and exacting of all intellectual disciplines. Throughout the night (A Night of Numbers), the channel showed films offering insights into the minds of great mathematicians, revealing the stories behind some of the great mathematical breakthroughs. The BBC’s celebration of mathematics has a strong Oxford flavour: Marcus du Sautoy presents ‘Music of the Primes’; ‘Breaking the Code’ draws on Andrew Hodges‘ biography of Alan Turing; many of the mathematical ideas in Escher’s work were suggested by Roger Penrose; and of course Andrew Wiles was an Oxford undergraduate. Some of the programmes are available as documentaries in CosmoLearning, underlined and hyperlinked, such as: The Music of the Primes, Breaking The Code, Fermat’s Last Theorem, Alan and Marcus Go Forth And Multiply.
