Escherization

http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/escherization/

https://web.archive.org/web/20060322021346/http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/escherization/

Over his life, the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher created over a hundred ingenious tesselations in the plane. Some were simple and geometric, used as prototypes for more complex endeavors. But in most the tiles were recognizable animal forms such as birds, fish and reptiles.

Escher was able to discover such tilings through a combination of natural ability and sheer determination.

The author of this site has developed a complex algorithm that can produce reasonable solutions to the Escherization problem.

There some very good examples which I can’t show you because they are all either exceed the maximum file size or image size for stumbleupon apart from this one which is probably the poorest example on the site:

The man responsible for all this is:

Craig S. Kaplan
Assistant Professor,
Computer Graphics Lab,
School of Computer Science,
University of Waterloo,
Ontario,
Canada.
http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/

He even looks clever doesn’t he?
And just to prove how clever he is he even lets you play at making your own compositions using a java applet here: http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/software/penrose/

and it’s it was a lot of fun, enjoy!