Little Adventures

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I Discover Escher

My life took some odd twists and turns, and by the late 1970s I found myself a manager at the University of Delaware's Computing Center. It was my job to make sure that students and professors got the help they needed in using the university's computers. I had many friends among the students who worked part time at the Computer Center. One of them taught me as much as I ever taught him. His name was Robert Dute.

Robert looked at life differently. He rented an apartment in a building filled with normal everyday run-of-the-mill students. Robert was not a run-of-the-mill student. He never had the electricity turned on and never furnished the place at all. He put a mattress in one corner of the living room for sleeping, and conducted his investigations sitting cross legged on the floor by the light of a kerosene lamp. Robert was a true student who learned things because he wanted to, not just because it was required of him. Once when we were talking about dome housing, I drew him a picture of what such a house looked like. He looked at the drawing for a while and then said that he wanted to learn how to draw and would see me later. It was four weeks later that I next saw him. He walked into my office and showed me a thick stack of drawings. In a month of concentrated artistic effort, he had gone from being pretty bad to being a pretty good. Robert was like that. An idea would possess him and become an all consuming passion until he was satisfied. He believed that he could do absolutely anything; all that was required was a daily commitment to trying. There is truth in this idea. Using Robert's philosophy, I have, over the years, taught myself to juggle, do sleight of hand magic tricks and memorize nearly anything.

Most Fridays at quitting time, Robert would show up at my office with a chess board under his arm and fire in his eyes. He was bound and determined to beat me at chess, though usually I was able to stave off his attacks and win. As we played, we talked about the week gone by. On one fateful Friday, I showed him a copy of Scientific American that had a beautiful tiling pattern on its cover. He was a little interested, so I dug out some older articles by Martin Gardner about the mathematics of such patterns. When Robert saw the equations, he asked me to explain, and I did my best. He was fascinated by the fusion of trigonometry with art involved in the paintings of M.C. Escher, and went away with his chess set and my magazines muttering about learning more about trigonometry and graphics programming.

Over the next two months he developed a program called ESCHER that allowed a person at a graphics computer terminal to create Escher-like drawings quickly and easily. I was his main tester and critic, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Ultimately, he developed a program which would generate beautiful black and white results, and I used many of Robert's symmetric drawings on the covers of Computer Center publications. One day, though, he was done with the ESCHER program and ready for another challenge. When last I saw Robert, he was writing an operating system for Prime minicomputers and the folks from Prime were offering him big bucks to come work for them.

Robert's ESCHER program was really great, but I wanted to write my own. ESCHER required a $3 million dollar Burroughs B6700 computer and an esoteric graphics terminal to run. Also, it only worked in black and white and printed its results on special, nasty smelling, purplish paper. What I wanted was to create color drawings on an inexpensive popular computer and to get sweet smelling results. Microcomputers for home use were just appearing. I decided I would wait a while before writing my version of ESCHER and then do it on a color-capable microcomputer.

In later years, I came to admired the polyhedra of M. C. Escher, which he decorated with interlocking patterns of lizards, starfish, and other creatures. I wanted to make my own decorated polyhedra, but could not, for a long time, puzzle out how to make the patterns interlock. And so, again, I tucked the project away in a corner of my mind and went about my daily business. Someday, someday I told myself, I will write the graphics program of my dreams.