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Welcome to the virtual home of the Department of Mathematics; our physical home is the Center for Mathematics and Computing (the CMC), which is pictured below.

Math Department People, Places, and Events

M. C. Escher and the Land O'Lakes Effect

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M. C. Escher and the Land O'Lakes Effect
In 1956 M. C. Escher made a lithograph called Prententoonstelling, or Print Gallery, which is unlike any of his other works in that it has a blurry white hole in the center. Like the Land O'Lakes box in the center of this picture, the hole in the center of Print Gallery ought to contain a (distorted) copy of the print itself, but it seems Escher did not know how to accomplish this. Recently mathematicians at Universiteit Leiden and the University of California at Berkeley have used complex functions to fill the hole in the center of Print Gallery. On October 10, Bart de Smit gave a Math department colloquium outlining the major techniques he and the rest of his team used to complete Print Gallery. For more information on this work, check out the restorations team's website and their article in the Notices of the AMS.

Photo:

Eric Egge