Mc escher artwork angels devils

Dutch artist M.C. Escher's most famous drawing, "Circle Limit IV (Heaven and Hell)", shows angels and demons in a tessellation that fills a circle without empty spaces.

This masterful woodcut inspired an international partnership of researchers including Politecnico di Milano Physics Department to author the cover-story article published in Physical Review Letters.

This free and unconventional work-of-art has provided valuable assistance to science.

The discovery

Researchers from Professor Paolo Biscari's group, together with their colleagues, discovered that the arrangement of angels and demons in the famous woodcut makes it possible to predict how a crystalline body will change its shape when subject to external action.

Escher's woodcut is linked to the work of mathematicians who in the middle of the last century were exploring the properties of hyperbolic spaces: The study's subject showed a connection between these spaces and everyday phenomena such as the permanent pl