So far, the formulas describing the so-called "Droste Effect" are somewhat involved. It is a historic fact, however, that at least one person could create stunning, famous artworks involving this effect solely on intuition and experience, without using any formal mathematics: M.C Escher. This gives me hope of creating intuitive software for exploring ideas about these weird and wonderful pictures in an informal, hands-on way.

The name "Droste" comes from a simple picture from a Dutch chocolate box. The math ideas there: iteration and shrinking. I found it on the Escher Droste site.


Escher made much more complex pictures. He used rotations, iterations, shrinking and other transformations, usually all together. Here is a good example, from the same site:


There is a Flickr group devoted to creating Escher Droste pictures using a Mathmap addon. Here is an example, by PhotoComiX


I want to have simple controls helping people deal with the transformations intuitively and visually.