[ahns]

One of Dutch artist M.C. Escher's works is a man is admiring a piece of art that itself depicts the building the (very same) man is in [0]. Escher left out the middle bit of the painting, probably since it's fairly complicated, putting his signature there instead. The video itself is about the complex analysis used to fill in that missing middle, based on a paper ~20 years ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)

[rcxdude]

I think the gap also has a compositional purpose: the viewer's eye is meant to travel around the image in a circle, and the gap helps anchor that in a way that the filled-in version might not.

[ahns]

Hm, since I can't edit my comment: link to paper [0]

[0] https://pub.math.leidenuniv.nl/~smitbde/papers/2003-de_smit-...

[daedrdev]

HN only allows editing comments for a short time