Penrose triangle

Penrose triangle The Penrose triangle, also known as the Penrose tribar, the impossible tribar, or the impossible triangle, is a triangular impossible object, an optical illusion consisting of an object that can be depicted in a perspective drawing. It cannot exist as a solid object in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space, although its surface can be embedded isometrically (bent but not stretched) in five-dimensional Euclidean space. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. Independently from Reutersvärd, the triangle was devised and popularized in the 1950s by psychiatrist Lionel Penrose and his son, the mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate Roger Penrose, who described it as "impossibility in its purest form". It is featured in the lithograph Waterfall (1961) by artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it.

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