Is there any reader here who is fluent in Arabic prepared to visit the Egypt Patent Office, at Kasr El Aini Street? Or perhaps interview Nadia Abdel Hafiz, his daughter, who now runs the company? If needs be, I am more than willing to pay someone here. From the pictures alone, it is not possible to be sure of this. In particular, one outstanding issue is that of finding the patent which surely exists (it is mentioned in an advert, seemingly registered under the name of the Nile Tile Company owned by Ibrahim Abdel Hafez, under number 451), and which will presumably show the exact geometry, which is unclear. A Plea for an Arabic Speaker and InvestigatorĪlthough much has been achieved with the Cairo tiling investigation, there are still some aspects left unresolved, some, but not all, caused by my (and my English speaking investigators) lacking in Arabic language ability. The blurring of the line between sky and water (between the birds and the fish) is accomplished by successively coarsening the pixel resolution of the tiles.1. "Sky and Water in the Digital Age", an homage to one of Escher's best-known prints, plays with the fact that the motifs in Fathauer's tessellations are just collections of pixels. Of course, the scene never existed except as a flat image on his computer screen. In "Chameleons", chameleons leave the tessellation on the computer screen to become part of a three-dimensional scene. Of course, the irony is that the "three-dimensional" scene is also just a flat drawing. In "Reptiles", one of his best known works, a reptile leaves a page on which the tessellation is drawn to become part of a three-dimensional scene. Several of Escher's prints play with the fact that his images are only two-dimensional drawings. While Escher designed his tessellations on paper, Robert Fathauer designs his directly on a Macintosh computer. He has used these fractal tessellations as the basis for several prints, including "Bats and Owls", "Fractal Fish - Grouped Groupers", and "Migration".
This latter print is based on a non-hyperbolic tessellation of triangles.Īided by an understanding of fractals, which were not widely recognized as a distinct branch of geometry in Escher's lifetime, Robert Fathauer has discovered hundreds of fractal tessellations, most of which have fractal boundaries. Escher made another print, "Square Limit", in which similar tiles (shaped the same, but of varying size) become infinitesimally small at the boundary. His best-known attempts at this (his "Circle Limit" prints) are based on hyperbolic geometry, which he learned about from the mathematician H.S.M. The same basic principle is used in "Face to Face" to create a number of distinct faces by varying the orientation of three different types of square tiles.Īnother preoccupation of Escher's was his desire to depict an infinite tessellation in a finite print. This features prominently in "Order and Chaos", in which both ordered and disordered regions are realized using the same two types of tiles. Following the lead of Roger Penrose, who designed tessellating chickens based on his non-periodic Penrose tiles, Robert Fathauer has designed several sets of tiles that fit together in many different combinations.
In Escher's tessellations, the tiles only fit together one way. Escher became famous for his tessellations in which the individual tiles are recognizable motif such as birds and fish. A tessellation is a collection of shapes called tiles that fit together without gaps or overlaps to cover the mathematical plane.
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