Louis Albert Necker1786–1861
The reversing cube, 1832
Swiss crystallographer who in 1832 noticed that a drawn cube flips between two readings of which face is in front.
Necker Lattice
A field of wireframe cubes with nothing to say which face is nearer. Stare, and the whole field turns inside out at once.
About this pattern
Louis Albert Necker, 1832
Necker, a crystallographer, noticed that his drawings of rhomboids kept reversing while he worked on them. Drawn in parallel projection with no occlusion, a cube gives two equally good readings and the visual system cannot hold both, so it alternates. Set out as a lattice the switch tends to propagate: neighbouring cubes flip together, and the sheet reverses as one surface rather than cube by cube.
Behind the mathematics