A United States physicist managed to escape a traffic fine for running a stop sign by proving his innocence with a mathematical paper, a tech site reported.

Wired UK reported Dmitri Krioukov, who is based at the University of California in San Diego, even won a prize for his efforts.

Krioukov put together the paper "The Proof of Innocence," which he has since published, when he faced a court hearing over allegedly driving through a stop sign.

"Actually, he sneezed, causing him to brake harder than usual... It was during this sneeze stop that another vehicle obscured the police officer’s view of Krioukov’s car, argues the paper," Wired UK said.

Krioukov premised his argument on three coincidences that he said made the police officer believe that he had seen him run a red light, when he had not.

In his paper, he wrote that if a car stops at a Stop sign, a police officer "at a certain distance perpendicular to the car trajectory, must have an illusion that the car does not stop," on three conditions.

These are:
Wired UK quoted Physics Central as saying that since the police officer was some 30 meters from the intersection where the stop sign was situated, “a car approaching the intersection with constant linear velocity will rapidly increase in angular velocity from the police officer’s perspective.”

Krioukov also created graphs showing what happens would have happened to his angular velocity if he had either been driving at a constant linear velocity or had made a quick stop then accelerated back to speed, which is what he claims happens.

But in his paper, he concluded it was not the police officer’s fault but he/she was wrong as their “perception of reality did not properly reflect reality.”

“A way to fight your traffic tickets. The paper was awarded a special prize of $400 that the author did not have to pay to the state of California,” read the abstract of the paper, Wired UK said. — LBG, GMA News