The Penrose stairs is an impossible object devised by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose and can be seen as a variation on his Penrose triangle. It is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher. This is clearly impossible in three dimensions; the two-dimensional figure achieves this paradox by distorting perspective.
The best known example of Penrose stairs appears in the lithographAscending and Descending by M. C. Escher, where it is incorporated into a monastery where several monks do penance by ascending continuously, but are allowed to turn around and descend occasionally.
The staircase had also been discovered previously by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, but neither Penrose nor Escher were aware of his designs.
Penrose began to work on the problem of whether a set of shapes could be found which would tile a surface but without generating a repeating pattern (known as quasi-symmetry).
Penrose was raised in a family with strong mathematical interests: his mother was a doctor, his father, a medical geneticist, used math in his work as well as his recreation, one brother is a mathematician, another was ten times British chess champion.
Roger and his father are the creators of the famous Penrosestaircase and the impossible triangle known as the tribar.
Penrose suspects that a greater understanding of the functioning of the human brain may depend on a fundamentally new understanding of physics, to be sought in a radical new theory of quantum gravity.
Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.
Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have constructed a theory in which human consciousness is the result of quantum gravity effects in microtubules.
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