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Jeff_Browntoday at 1:38 PM6 repliesview on HN

I love 3B1B but generally don't have time to watch long videos. Can anyone sum up the punchline?


Replies

ahnstoday at 1:47 PM

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)

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pdpitoday at 2:23 PM

The 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.

But, as with all jokes, the punchline isn't funny at all without the setup.

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yreadtoday at 2:19 PM

The print gallery is just Aw^c in the complex plane

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rcxdudetoday at 2:36 PM

The 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.

oulipo2today at 2:14 PM

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?

Lerctoday at 3:50 PM

Awᶜ

This kind of risks obscuring what's actually going on.