Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, and philosopher of science. He holds the title of Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and is an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, as well as an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge, and University College London. In 1988, he shared the Wolf Prize in Physics with Stephen Hawking for their work on the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and in 2020 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity. Penrose is also known for devising the Penrose triangle, an impossible object he described as “impossibility in its purest form,” which he developed with his father and shared with artist M. C. Escher; this exchange inspired Escher’s works *Waterfall* and *Ascending and Descending*. His eponymous aperiodic tiling preceded the discovery of quasicrystals by Dan Shechtman. Penrose won the Royal Society Science Book Prize for *The Emperor’s New Mind* (1989), which presents his ideas on physics and consciousness, and later wrote *The Road to Reality* (2004), subtitled “A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.” Born in Colchester, Essex, to physician Margaret and psychiatrist-geneticist Lionel Penrose, he was inspired as a child by George Gamow’s Mr. Tompkins books. He earned a first-class BSc in mathematics from University College London in 1952. As a doctoral student in 1955, he reintroduced the Moore–Penrose inverse. He received his PhD in algebraic geometry from St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1957. During his career, Penrose shifted from pure mathematics to astrophysics after Dennis Sciama drew his attention to the field. In 1964, he revolutionized the mathematical tools for analyzing spacetime by focusing on topology and conformal structure rather than detailed geometry, leading to his 1969 cosmic censorship conjecture.