M. C. Escher

Hello! My name is Maurits Cornelis Escher, but my friends called me Mauk. I was born a very long time ago, on June 17th, 1898, in a country called the Netherlands. When I was a boy, I didn't always do well in subjects like math at school. But there was one thing I loved more than anything else: drawing. I could spend hours and hours with my pencils, creating pictures of the world I saw around me. My father was an engineer who built things, and he was wonderful. He saw how much I loved art and always encouraged me to keep practicing my creativity.

When I grew up, I thought maybe I should be an architect and design big buildings. In 1919, I went to a special school to learn how. But at that school, my art teacher, a kind man named Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, looked at my drawings very carefully. He saw that I had a special talent for graphic arts. That means making pictures by carving them into wood or stone and then printing them. He told me I should follow my heart. So, I listened to him and changed my studies to focus on what I truly loved most, which was creating unique art.

I loved to travel and see new and exciting places. A trip I took in 1922 changed my art forever. I went to Spain and visited a beautiful palace called the Alhambra. The walls and floors there were completely covered in amazing tiles. The tiles had repeating patterns that fit together perfectly, just like a puzzle with no empty spaces. These special patterns are called tessellations. I was so amazed and inspired. I went back home and started drawing my own tessellations. But instead of just using shapes like squares and triangles, I used birds, fish, and lizards that all locked together perfectly. During my travels in Italy, I also met my wonderful wife, Jetta. We fell in love and were married in 1924.

After my travels, my art started to become well-known because it was so different. I loved to create pictures that played tricks on your eyes. I drew pictures of staircases that seemed to go up and up forever without ever reaching the top. I also drew waterfalls where the water flowed all the way back up to the top to fall down all over again. People call these 'impossible constructions' because they couldn't really exist in our world. But they were so much fun to draw and even more fun to look at. My art proved that math and art could be best friends, working together to make something magical.

I spent my whole life creating these puzzling and amazing pictures. My art was my greatest joy. I lived to be 73 years old, and my work eventually became famous all over the world. Even today, many years later, people look at my art and scratch their heads, wondering, 'How did he do that?' I hope my drawings inspire you to look at the world a little differently and to see all the fun and wonder you can find in both art and math.