MathOverflow will be down for maintenance for approximately 3 hours, starting Monday evening (06/24/2013) at approximately 9:00 PM Eastern time (UTC-4).
show/hide this revision's text 2 add info about construction

'Around 1956, Escher explored the concept of representing infinity on a two-dimensional plane. Discussions with Canadian mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter inspired Escher's interest in hyperbolic tessellations, which are regular tilings of the hyperbolic plane. Escher's works Circle Limit I–IV demonstrate this concept. In 1995, Coxeter verified that Escher had achieved mathematical perfection in his etchings in a published paper. Coxeter wrote, "Escher got it absolutely right to the millimeter."'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

If Angels and Devils is a hyperbolic tessellation then it might have been inspired by Coxeter.

The construction itself was done using techniques like these:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.133.8746&rep=rep1&type=pdf
show/hide this revision's text 1

'Around 1956, Escher explored the concept of representing infinity on a two-dimensional plane. Discussions with Canadian mathematician H.S.M. Coxeter inspired Escher's interest in hyperbolic tessellations, which are regular tilings of the hyperbolic plane. Escher's works Circle Limit I–IV demonstrate this concept. In 1995, Coxeter verified that Escher had achieved mathematical perfection in his etchings in a published paper. Coxeter wrote, "Escher got it absolutely right to the millimeter."'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._C._Escher

If Angels and Devils is a hyperbolic tessellation then it might have been inspired by Coxeter.