3 ms·
I first saw this idea on the cover of Goedel, Escher, Bach. I wonder how old the history goes?
by dzdt 8y ago
I first saw this idea on the cover of Goedel, Escher, Bach. I wonder how old the history goes?
- dahart 8y agoGood question, and I don’t know but I tried searching for a few minutes. I suspect there are centuries old examples, but I haven’t found any yet. One thing I did find is a Siggraph paper on how to construct these from non axis-aligned angles, which seems interesting. In it they reference GEB and also artists Shigeo Fukuda and Noble & Webster. https://graphics.stanford.edu/~niloy/research/shadowArt/shadowArt_sigA_09.html https://graphics.stanford.edu/~niloy/research/shadowArt/shad...
- Isamu 8y agoYeah, that was 1979. I bought that when it first came out because Martin Gardner did a whole article on it in Scientific American. If I recall correctly he also posed the question of which letter combinations would not work in a three-way sculpture like that? But I can think of at least one older precedent, a woodcarving puzzle: can you carve an object that perfectly fits a round opening, a square opening, and a triangle opening? And the answer is just the 3-way orthogonal intersection of those shapes. That is from the 1920s or 1930s.