40 Facts About Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose was born on 8 August 1931 and is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate in Physics.

Roger Penrose is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics in the University of Oxford, an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford, and an honorary fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, and University College London.

Roger Penrose won the Royal Society Science Books Prize for The Emperor's New Mind, which outlines his views on physics and consciousness.

Roger Penrose followed it with The Road to Reality, billed as "A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe".

Roger Penrose's paternal grandparents were J Doyle Penrose, an Irish-born artist, and The Hon.

Roger Penrose's uncle was artist Sir Roland Penrose, whose son with American photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose.

Roger Penrose spent World War II as a child in Canada where his father worked in London, Ontario at the Ontario Hospital and Western University.

Roger Penrose then attended University College London, where he obtained a BSc degree with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1952.

Roger Penrose devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in the 1950s in collaboration with his father, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form", and exchanged material with the artist M C Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it.

Together with his father, a physicist and mathematician, Roger Penrose went on to design a staircase that simultaneously loops up and down.

In 1964, while a reader at Birkbeck College, London, in the words of Kip Thorne of Caltech, "Roger Penrose revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime".

In 1967, Roger Penrose invented the twistor theory, which maps geometric objects in Minkowski space into the 4-dimensional complex space with the metric signature.

Roger Penrose is well known for his 1974 discovery of Roger Penrose tilings, which are formed from two tiles that can only tile the plane nonperiodically, and are the first tilings to exhibit fivefold rotational symmetry.

Roger Penrose was influential in popularizing what are commonly known as Penrose diagrams.

In 1983, Roger Penrose was invited to teach at Rice University in Houston, by the then provost Bill Gordon.

In 2004, Roger Penrose released The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,099-page comprehensive guide to the Laws of Physics that includes an explanation of his own theory.

The Roger Penrose Interpretation predicts the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity, and proposes that a quantum state remains in superposition until the difference of space-time curvature attains a significant level.

Roger Penrose is the Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University.

In 2010, Roger Penrose reported possible evidence, based on concentric circles found in Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe data of the cosmic microwave background sky, of an earlier universe existing before the Big Bang of our own present universe.

Roger Penrose made several conjectures about C and the WCH, some of which were subsequently proved by others, and he popularized his conformal cyclic cosmology theory.

In simple terms, Roger Penrose believes that the singularity in Einstein's field equation at the Big Bang is only an apparent singularity, similar to the well-known apparent singularity at the event horizon of a black hole.

The latter singularity can be removed by a change of coordinate system, and Roger Penrose proposes a different change of coordinate system that will remove the singularity at the big bang.

Roger Penrose has written books on the connection between fundamental physics and human consciousness.

Roger Penrose uses a variant of Turing's halting theorem to demonstrate that a system can be deterministic without being algorithmic.

Roger Penrose argues that computers today are unable to have intelligence because they are algorithmically deterministic systems.

Roger Penrose argues against the viewpoint that the rational processes of the mind are completely algorithmic and can thus be duplicated by a sufficiently complex computer.

Roger Penrose responded to criticism of The Emperor's New Mind with his follow-up 1994 book Shadows of the Mind, and in 1997 with The Large, the Small and the Human Mind.

In January 2014, Hameroff and Roger Penrose ventured that a discovery of quantum vibrations in microtubules by Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan supports the hypothesis of Orch-OR theory.

Roger Penrose has been awarded many prizes for his contributions to science.

Roger Penrose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972.

In 1975, Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose were jointly awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In 1989, Roger Penrose was awarded the Dirac Medal and Prize of the British Institute of Physics.

Roger Penrose was made an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics.

In 1990, Roger Penrose was awarded the Albert Einstein Medal for outstanding work related to the work of Albert Einstein by the Albert Einstein Society.

In 2008, Roger Penrose was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.

Roger Penrose is a Distinguished Supporter of Humanists UK and one of the patrons of the Oxford University Scientific Society.

Roger Penrose was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2011.

In 2012, Penrose was awarded the Richard R Ernst Medal by ETH Zurich for his contributions to science and strengthening the connection between science and society.

In 2020, Roger Penrose was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, a half-share going to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.

Roger Penrose is married to Vanessa Thomas, director of Academic Development at Cokethorpe School and former head of mathematics at Abingdon School.