[00:01] art I think I've ever seen. It's M.C. Escher's 1956 lithograph, The Print Gallery. And it takes a little moment to wrap your head around what's going on. We have a man looking at a picture of a boat. That boat is in a harbor of a
[00:14] buildings. And you go over and one of those buildings is a gallery full of artwork. And down the hall, here we find the same man staring at a picture of a boat. In a letter to his son, Escher called this "the most peculiar thing
[00:28] that I have ever done." Which for him is saying a lot. In 2003, the mathematicians De Smit and Lenstra offered a really delightful analysis of scenes of this picture. And it's something Escher himself didn't even
[00:42] realize. The crux involves a very beautiful idea that can be summarized as taking the logarithm of an image. That might sound like nonsense, but I promise, if you explain it the right way, it's actually a really cool and
[00:54] abundantly reasonable thing to do. One conclusion that popped out of this analysis is an answer to a question that doesn't even feel like it should have an answer, which is what exactly goes in this hole in the middle? If you think
[01:06] about it, that almost seems paradoxical because if you come at it from above, it town. But if you come at it from the left, it's more fitting to be part of the picture frame. Come at it from below and it seems more like part of the print
[01:18] gallery. So somehow all of the ambiguity about where exactly you are in this whole scene is compressed into that blank spot in the middle. The full video I made about this topic is really one of my favorites in a long
[01:31] time. So next time you're in the mood to be out of the shorts feed and sitting a lot to me if you considered taking a look.