Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Renvoi

I found this picture and I absolutely love it:



In art, it's called the mise-en-abime, or mise-en-abyme, depending on your spelling predilections. A famous one is the Dutch Cocoa girl:



Something like this also happens in computer science. The act of the function referring to itself is the recursive call of the lambda-calculus. This evaluation of the evaluation serves as the foundation of pretty much all computational theory.

As for the word renvoi, this is what the French call standing between two mirrors and peering into the infinity of the reflection, much like the mise-en-abime.




1 comment:

  1. "fractal"s can make infinity images as well.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set#Self-similarity

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