Roger Penrose

Penrose was born on August 8, 1931, in Colchester, England. His father, Lionel Sharples Penrose, was a medically trained scientist working on human genetics, and his mother, Margaret Leathes, had studied medicine. He was the second of three sons, between Oliver and Jonathan, and has a sister, Shirley.⁠[1]

In 1939 the family went with his father to North America, where his father took a hospital post in London, Ontario, Canada; Penrose went to school there and began making polyhedra at about ten. The family returned to England after the war.⁠[2]

In 1952 he graduated from University College London with a first-class degree in mathematics; UCL later made him an Honorary Fellow in 1975.⁠[3]

He researched algebraic geometry at St John’s College, Cambridge, first under Hodge and then under John Todd, and received his PhD in 1957.⁠[2]

In 1954, while still a student at Cambridge, he encountered the work of the Dutch graphic artist M. C. Escher at a conference in Amsterdam and, with his father, went on to produce the Penrose triangle and the “Impossible Stair,” illusions that inspired Escher’s Waterfall and Ascending and Descending.⁠[4]

In these years he was an assistant lecturer at Bedford College, a research fellow of St John’s College and a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London, held a NATO fellowship at Princeton, Syracuse and CornellCornell UniversityCornell University is a private research university in Ithaca, New York, and a member of the Ivy League. It is New York State's federal land-grant university, a distinction unique within the Ivy League. Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White founded the university in 1865, and it opened in 1868. In addition to its Ithaca campus, Cornell operates Weill Cornell Medicine and Cornell Tech in New York City and a medical college in Qatar. It enrolled 26,793 students in fall 2024. Its president is Michael I. Kotlikoff.Open the full entry, and spent a year at the University of Texas.⁠[5]

He records that he married Joan Isabel Wedge in 1958, divorcing in 1980, and married Vanessa Dee Thomas in 1988. He has four sons.⁠[1]

From 1964 to 1973 he was reader and professor of applied mathematics at Birkbeck College, London, and from 1973 held the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics at Oxford.⁠[6]

On January 18, 1965, Physical Review Letters volume 14, issue 3, published his paper “Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities,” beginning on page 57.⁠[7]

In 1971 the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics awarded him the Dannie Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics.⁠[8]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972 and served on its Council from December 1980 to November 1982. The society credits him with inventing twistor theory and proposing the cosmic censorship hypothesis.⁠[9]

In 1974 he created a set of tiles that can cover an infinite plane without the pattern ever repeating, the best-known version consisting of two shapes called the “kite” and the “dart.” In 1982 Daniel Shechtman found a similar non-repeating atomic arrangement in an aluminum-manganese alloy, later called a quasicrystal.⁠[10]

In 1988 he and Stephen Hawking shared the Wolf Prize in Physics for developing the theory of general relativity, showing the necessity of cosmological singularities and elucidating the physics of black holes.⁠[11]

In 1989 he published The Emperor’s New Mind, which challenged the premise that consciousness is computation and proposed that new physics is needed to understand it.⁠[12]

He was knighted in 1994.⁠[9]

In April 1996 he and University of Arizona anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff published a paper in Mathematics and Computers in Simulation proposing, on the basis of the objective reduction (OR) of the wave function that Penrose had put forward in 1994, that consciousness arises from quantum coherence and its reduction in neuronal microtubules.⁠[13]

In 1997 Kimberly-Clark produced quilted toilet paper embossed with a Penrose tiling design at Aylesford, Kent, England; a four-roll pack later entered the Science Museum Group collection.⁠[14]

From 1998 to 2001 he was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London.⁠[6]

A notice in The Gazette records his appointment by the Queen to the Order of Merit, dated May 9, 2000, alongside James Black, Anthony Caro and Tom Stoppard.⁠[15]

In 2004 Jonathan Cape published his The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe, a 1,094-page book covering mathematics, quantum mechanics, particle physics and general relativity and setting out his own proposals on open problems such as quantum gravity.⁠[16]

In July 2008 the Royal Society awarded him the Copley Medal, the world’s oldest prize for scientific achievement, for his exceptional contributions to geometry and mathematical physics.⁠[17]

In Cycles of Time (2010) he set out his conformal cyclic cosmology.⁠[6]

The theory met scepticism from many cosmologists after it was put forward in 2005; in 2010 he and Vahe Gurzadyan claimed to have found supporting rings of uniform temperature in the cosmic microwave background.⁠[18]

In 2015 he gave a plenary talk, “Light cones, black holes, infinity and beyond,” at a Queen Mary University of London conference marking 100 years of general relativity; he is known for lecturing with his own hand-drawn colour transparencies rather than slides.⁠[19]

On March 14, 2017, co-founder James Tagg announced at the Royal Institution an institute named after him, to be based in San Diego with collaborations in London, Oxford and Tucson, to study the interplay between quantum mechanics and general relativity and its implications for understanding consciousness.⁠[12]

On August 6, 2018, he, Daniel An, Krzysztof Meissner and Pawel Nurowski submitted a paper to arXiv reporting anomalous circular spots of raised temperature in Planck and WMAP cosmic microwave background data, which they attributed to point-like energetic sources.⁠[20]

They interpreted the spots as radiation from the Hawking evaporation of supermassive black holes in a previous aeon; other researchers, including James Zibin, were sceptical, arguing that the analysis did not properly account for the “look elsewhere” effect.⁠[18]

On March 31, 2020, he appeared on episode 85 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing consciousness and computation, what is missing in quantum mechanics, the source of consciousness in the human brain and infinite cycles of big bangs.⁠[21]

On October 6, 2020, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”.⁠[22]

He received half of the prize, with the other half shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.⁠[8]

On December 8, 2020, he delivered his pre-recorded Nobel Lecture, “Black Holes, Cosmology, and Space-Time Singularities.”⁠[23]

The same day he received the Nobel medal and diploma at the Swedish Ambassador’s Residence in London.⁠[24]

On February 16, 2021, Oxford’s Mathematical Institute and Wadham College held an online public lecture celebrating his prize, at which he gave an extended version of his Nobel Lecture on his path to the first general singularity theorem of general relativity and was interviewed by Melvyn Bragg.⁠[25]

He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Wadham College.⁠[22]

His non-periodic tilings pave the entrance of Oxford’s Andrew Wiles Mathematics Building and the Transbay Center in San Francisco; The Science of Consciousness conference lists him as a 2026 speaker.⁠[5]

University of Oxford: Official website: https://www.ox.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]

Gresham College: Official website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]