It ascends one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started. This is the kind of problem people who are trapped in the geometrically impossible, yet still strangely plausible, worlds of MC Escher have to deal with all the time. His father was a hydraulic engineer – an important job in a country with so much land reclaimed from the sea. Escher’s dive into the beauty of maths and science started when his eyes were opened by an art even older than that of the Renaissance. When Escher saw these Escheresque objects, he responded with his own fantastic interpretations of the infinite staircase and the Penrose triangle.

Source: The Guardian December 10, 2021 06:03 UTC