Eternal Scream - A Droste Effect

Today’s Math Art is a little different. Instead of finding artistic images borne from mathematical formulae and simulations, today, I’ll focus on mathematics found in art.

Undoubtedly when art and math are mentioned, a few names are common to tongue - Leonardo da Vinci, M.C. Escher and the like. Escher was a modern artist who used a lot of mathematics in his art, and amongst others, he popularized the Droste Effect.

The Droste Effect is essentially a picture with a smaller version of itself within the picture. The smaller version of the picture would have even smaller versions of the same picture, and so on and so forth to infinity. Mathematicians call this self-similar recursion. These pictures can be as simple as a picture-within-a-picture-within-a-picture (ad infinitum), or can be as complex as to spirals into infinity by means of various transforms.

When put together, a complex Droste Effect picture spiralling into infinity can look very bizzare, very surreal and quite disorienting. But then again, the human mind isn’t built to cognize infinity.

Today’s Math Art is Eternal Scream by Josh Sommers, who wrote a very good tutorial on how to make your own Droste Effect photos. He also has a wonderful gallery of Droste Effect pictures, so do knock yourself out!

And where’s the math you ask? Well, the mathematicians in the Leiden University in the Netherlands have provided a mathematical explanation of Escher’s images, so do read it.