David Reimann

Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
Albion College
Albion, Michigan

I am interested in mathematical patterns that convey a message at multiple levels or scales. I enjoy creating art that uses text to form geometric patterns and geometric patterns that form text. I am also very interested in using tessellations as the basis of interesting patterns.

1944
1944
12" x 12"
digital print
2013

During World War II, M.C. Escher began investigating ribbon patterns from simple blocks. In 1944, Escher's teacher, Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, was taken from his home in the Netherlands by the German Forces to Auschwitz where he was killed. One of Escher's ribbon designs was a hexagonal tile with bands connecting pairs of sides and two accented corners. This artwork uses Escher's hexagonal tile to create a pattern having cyclic symmetry of order 3. The central hexagram represents Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. The black knot represents the Nazi strangle on Europe. The small yellow points represent other Jews, some protected by friends represented by orange bands.