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5. PENROSE TRIANGLE, PERTH The ‘Penrose triangle’, also known as the ‘Penrose tribar’ and the ‘Impossible triangle’, is an impossible object. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. The mathematician Roger Penrose independently devised and popularized it in the 1950s, describing it as ‘impossibility in its purest form’. In fact it was the works of artist M. C. Escher which brought the object to the public’s attention, and it was Escher’s earlier depictions of impossible objects which partly inspired it. The tribar appears to be a solid object, made of three straight beams of square cross-section which meet pairwise at right angles at the vertices of the triangle they form. Of course, there has to be a catch! This illustrated sculpture of the tribar is in East Perth, Western Australia.
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– Paul Scott |
