M.C. Escher on Loneliness, Creativity, and How Rachel Carson [born #OTD] Inspired His Art, with a Side of Bach:
The above article mentions that Rachel Carson owned two signed prints by M.C. Escher; it's been noted elsewhere that one was Fish and Frogs (1949), but does anyone know what the second one was?
Tetrahedra and octahedra assembled to this object... .. I love how it can be regarded as art.... but also be used as a practical item to store stuff and build lamp shields and whatever...
... one can also turn it into a tiny hanging shelf to store lightweight stuff like origami models...
I made art of the newly discovered aperiodic monotiling!!
If you don’t follow math news, this turtle-like shape is the solution to a long-standing open problem in mathematics that goes as follows: Let’s say that you want to completely cover a plane with tiles (i.e. tessellate a plane) in such a way that the tiles never create a repeating pattern (i.e. the tiling is aperiodic). What is the fewest number of tile shapes you need to do that?
For a long time, mathematicians had only been able to find a two-shape tiling that never repeated a pattern. This was called a Penrose Tiling. But just last month (March 2023) a paper came out proving that the above shape can aperiodically tile the plane by itself!*
This is really cool and has lots of mathematicians and scientists super excited, not just because it’s an elegant solution to a decades-old problem, but also because we might be able to create new materials with unusual properties using this tiling as a base for molecular crystal structures (just like scientists were able to find for the Penrose tiling)!
If you want to learn more about the discovery, the NYTimes has a really good article here, and you can read the original paper (or just look at more pretty pictures of the tiling) here!
* As long as you’re allowed to occasionally flip the tile over. I colored the flipped tiles purple in my art to emphasize them.