Escher drew infinity while calling himself no mathematician
Maurits Cornelis Escher, born 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden and dead 27 March 1972, filled woodcuts and lithographs with impossible stairs and endless tilings. Art critics long shrugged; scientists and Martin Gardner's 1966 Scientific American column made him a household name for visual paradox.
Known as Mauk to family, he was the youngest son of engineer George Arnold Escher and Sara Gleichman. After a frail childhood in Arnhem he tried Delft, then the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts from 1919 to 1922, abandoning architecture for woodcut under Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. A 1922 tour of Italy and Spain—Florence to Granada—locked his eye on Alhambra tilework whose interlocking symmetries he later treated as research of his own.
He married Swiss Jetta Umiker in 1924 and lived in Rome until Mussolini's climate drove the family out in 1935 after son George was forced into a Ballila uniform. Switzerland bored him; Brussels came next; in January 1941 war pushed them to Baarn, where most of the famous studio work was made under gray Dutch skies that kept him indoors. An obsessive 1936 return to the Alhambra and Córdoba's Mezquita ended his long outdoor sketching trips; after 1937 the pictures grew from geometric analysis rather than landscape diaries, and postage stamps for the Netherlands joined the printmaking load.
He corresponded with George Pólya, Roger Penrose, Donald Coxeter, and crystallographer Friedrich Haag, studying the seventeen wallpaper groups despite insisting he lacked mathematical talent. July 1969's final woodcut Snakes used three blocks rotated three times each—nine press runs—to shrink linked rings toward infinity. Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 Gödel, Escher, Bach carried the images into philosophy; Escher died in Hilversum aged seventy-three and rests in Baarn's New Cemetery after a last studio stretch at the Rosa Spier Huis in Laren.
Source: M. C. Escher
