Escher-like spiral tilings

Escher-like spiral tilings

(GMT)
Craig Kaplan (University of Waterloo)

In the course of his explorations of the visual representation of infinity, M.C. Escher created several prints in which tessellated figures spiral inward towards a limit in the centre of the design.  I present a pleasingly simple way to think about these spiral tilings, based on the exponential function in the complex plane, and connect it to a few other related ideas in mathematical art.