Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose was born on August 8, 1931 in Colchester, Essex, England.

In 1958, Penrose and his father, geneticist Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898-1972), for fun published the article "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion" (British Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, 1958, pp. 31-33), describing two impossible objects: the impossible tri-bar and the impossible staircase. M.C. Escher used the structure of the staircase in his well-known lithograph "Ascending and Descending" and the Penrose impossible triangle as the basis of his lithograph "Waterfall."

Penrose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1972 and a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1998. He has earned many prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their understanding of the universe, the Dannie Heinemann Prize, the Royal Society Royal Medal, the Dirac Medal, and the Albert Einstein prize. In 1994 he was knighted for services to science.

Holds the position of Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University since 1973. At Oxford, Penrose has been working on 'twistor theory' in which the four dimensions of space-time are quantized by imaginary numbers as opposed to real numbers.

His 1989 book, 'The Emperor's New Mind', became a best-seller and won the 1990 Rhone-Poulenc Science Book Prize.

He was awarded the Order of Merit in the 2000 Queen's New Years Honours List for his services to education. He is the Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College at Oxford University in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England.

Co-laureate of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez, for research on black holes.