Escher and Elliptic Curves

melquiades writes "Mathematician Hendrik Lenstra was struck by the blank spot in M. C. Escher's Print Gallery . Why is the spot blank there, he wondered, and what should go in it? Although Escher, who had only a high-school mathematics background, drew the picture by brilliant and methodical intuition, the mathematical machinery underlying the image turned out to be elliptic curves (which come up in factorization, cryptography, and the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem). Lenstra and his colleagues were able to generate several breathtaking possible completions for the missing space. Read the story at the ever-registration-required NYT."

Comments

better things to do with his time

[smellmyfart]

Why is it so important to solve this problem?! Honestly, he could have done better things with his time. Here are a few suggestions: 1. Gotten a better haircut (check out his picture in the NYT). 2. Gotten Laid 3. Destroyed a copy of Windows with a bat 4. Figured out if Bill Gates secretly fantasies about using Linux naked 5. Surfed for free porn on the net 6. Solved world hunger 7. Figured out why my farts smell so bad What an utter waste of time, leave your suggestions on what else this guy could of have done.