One of Dutch artist M.C. Escher's works is a man is admiring a piece of art that itself depicts the building the (very same) man is in [0]. Escher left out the middle bit of the painting, probably since it's fairly complicated, putting his signature there instead. The video itself is about the complex analysis used to fill in that missing middle, based on a paper ~20 years ago.
reply[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)
I think the gap also has a compositional purpose: the viewer's eye is meant to travel around the image in a circle, and the gap helps anchor that in a way that the filled-in version might not.
replyHm, since I can't edit my comment: link to paper [0]
reply[0] https://pub.math.leidenuniv.nl/~smitbde/papers/2003-de_smit-...
HN only allows editing comments for a short time
replyThe punchline is that you can fill in the centre of Escher's piece by using complex analysis, and it produces a very satisfying, "obviously correct", solution.
replyBut, as with all jokes, the punchline isn't funny at all without the setup.
The joke is that if you fill in the center, it shows the Droste effect of the image and kind of diminishes the magic of it.
replyThe print gallery is just Aw^c in the complex plane
replyAnswers that are only comprehensible to those who already know the answer:
replyWell he wanted video boiled down to the punchline. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.
replyWell, maybe, but that seems like a deliberately uncharitable interpretation of the question, which I interpreted more as "Can you summarize the video in ~1 line?" - or at least closer to that than "Can you give me the answer the video comes to without specifying the question it asks?"
replyEven in those terms the answer given isn't really an answer because it just gives an expression with undefined variables.
The whole point is the explanation... it's a bit like someone telling you to take a 2 week holidays somewhere and you'd just say: it's too long, can't someone just get me a plane ticket there and back the same day so I can compress the stay?
replyThe image is essentially a self-similar 'droste-effect' image in disguise. The warping of that image shifts that self- similarity into a visual loop, but the warped image still has a droste-style self-similarity in the center as well.
replyAwᶜ
replyThis kind of risks obscuring what's actually going on.
Obscurity indeed. This morning shortly after I woke up I read your message and could only think that you were referring to Awk somehow. That didn’t make much sense to me. Now, hours later and after finally eating something, it does make sense! You really do have to have your faculties about you.
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