Wednesday, October 23, 2013

The Tesselation of Smaug

My ten year-old has been studying tesselations in geometry lately. A tesselation is a pattern of identical shapes that fit together without any gaps or overlap, such as hexagons in a beehive.

With the excitement of seeing the recently released trailer for the new movie, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, the words "Tesselation of Smaug" came out of his mouth while doing his math worksheet. This immediately reminded me of M.C. Escher, so I googled "escher tesselation dragon" and came up with the Dragon Metamorphosis picture by Robert Fathauer at this link: mathartfun. It’s not Escher's, but done very much in his style.

Cool, huh?