Any box of Droste cocoa shows an infinite series of beautiful Dutch ladies holding trays with boxes of Droste cocoa, and so on–Netherlanders call such images “Droste effects.” Dutch graphic artist MC Escher delighted in similar and even more complex designs. Is their hypnotic spell purely artistic? Metaphysical? Mathematical?
Physicists at the University of Leiden have created some gorgeous studies and animations of Escher’s “Print Gallery”. (Warning: artistic non-fungible-time warp. ) 
One of the original researchers, Bart de Smit, will be speaking at MIT on Tuesday, March 13. To quote the MIT lecture announcement:
One of M.C. Escher’s most intriguing works depicts a man standing in a gallery who looks at a print of a city that contains the building that he is standing in himself. This picture, with the title Print Gallery, contains a mysterious white hole in the middle. Two years ago, Hendrik Lenstra discovered the mathematical structure of this print. Using well known mathematical results about elliptic curves, Lenstra showed that what Escher was trying to achieve has a unique mathematical solution….. With help from artists and computer scientists, we have constructed a completion of the picture.The white hole turns out to contain the entire image on a smaller scale, which in the Dutch language is known as the Droste effect…. In the talk, the mathematics behind Escher’s work and the process of making the completion will be explained and visualized with computer animations.
That’s coming up Thursday,
March 13,
4:15pm – 5:30pm, in MIT’s 10-250. I don’t know about you, but I can hardly wait.
This fascinatingly ugly object is a
Critterbug, marketed as a cat toy, but in fact a battery-powered laser pointer. Available where cat toys are sold (I paid $12.95 plus tax in Cambridge, MA), it is just what you need to spice up any PowerPoint presentation. Available in many hideous colors-I think my favorite is green, but the red has a certain shock value all its own.