Penrose Triangle

optical illusion · impossible geometry · mind-bending art

Looks totally real. When you draw a Penrose triangle, it appears to be a normal triangle made of three connected bars. But if you try to trace along the edges with your finger, your eye gets confused because the angles don't actually work together in real space.

Created by artists. A Swedish artist named Oscar Reutersvärd drew the first Penrose triangle in 1934. Later, a psychiatrist named Lionel Penrose and his mathematician son Roger Penrose made it famous in the 1950s by calling it "impossibility in its purest form."

Tricks your brain. Your brain tries to see the triangle as a solid object because it's trained to make sense of drawings. The impossible angles fool you into thinking something 3D exists, even though it actually can't.

Could exist in higher dimensions. While the Penrose triangle cannot exist as a solid in our normal 3D world, mathematicians proved that you could theoretically create its surface in five-dimensional space, where the geometry works differently.

Inspired great artists. The famous artist M.C. Escher loved impossible shapes and used the Penrose triangle to inspire his 1961 lithograph called Waterfall, which shows water flowing up and down at the same time.