Figure and Ground..
The following piece of information reached me again, today.

The Yuki tribe in Northern California have a number system that has a base 8. The reason for this, is that they count 8 with the fingers of their hands. That is, they dont count the fingers - but the spaces between fingers.

This was a fascinating piece of information for me, when I first came to know about it. And I am just typing out whatever I know - as related to this concept or principle or whatever you might call it.

Some pictures of MC Escher have the same element in them. A beautiful piece of "mathematical art" wherein he conveyed one meaning in the foreground and one in the background. And importantly - both meanings distinct from each other.

Escher had mastered this art. You can see the same principle in many of his paintings. For more on Escher, you can go here.

We can see this element in many other art forms.

Theater or Drama, for example. How many times have we seen a one-sided telephonic conversation on the screen wherein the audience, ideally, should be left to assume and interpret what is happening at the other end. In Indian movies, mostly the audience is abused, by the speaker repeating whatever the other end speaks. However, if the artist wants to be cryptic, he can just leave it as one-sided and we have another example of figure and ground! The ground isn't visible readily, but is left for interpretation.

There is a discussion about how this same concept arises in the music of Bach in the book Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. In fact, most of what I have written here is inspired by what I read in that book.

Hofstadter goes on to extend this same concept to explain Kurt Godel's theorem on the Incompleteness of Axiomatic systems. I can't write much about it because of the obvious lack of insight or understanding I have on the mathematical part of it. All I could do here was to jot down whatever I knew or could relate to from what I read!

Thanks for the attention.