Kōkichi Sugihara

Kōkichi Sugihara (, born June 29, 1948, in Gifu Prefecture) is a Japanese mathematician and artist known for his three-dimensional optical illusions that appear to make marbles roll uphill, pull objects to the highest point of a building's roof, and make circular pipes look rectangular. His illusions, which often involve videos of three-dimensional objects shown from carefully chosen perspectives, and second place in 2015

Illusions Five of Sugihara's illusions have won awards at the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest: In 2010, his illusion "Impossible Motion: Magnet Slopes" won first place in the contest. This illusion uses forced perspective to show marbles seemingly rolling up ramps. In 2015 his "Ambiguous Garage Roof" won second place. The illusion appears to show a convex roof surface that is reflected in a mirror to a corrugated zig-zag shape. Neither of these appearances accurately describes the true shape of the roof. In 2016 he won second place again for "Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion", which shows a stack of cylinders that from one point of view appear to have a circular cross-section, and from another point of view appear rectangular. In 2020 he won his first place for his "3D Schroeder Staircase". which he published in the 1986 MIT Press book Machine Interpretation of Line Drawings. When he asked his computer system to interpret impossible objects such as the ones in the art of M. C. Escher, he discovered that they could be interpreted as drawings of real objects with unexpected shapes.