Roger Penrose

Sir
Roger Penrose
OM FRS
Penrose in 2011
Born (1931-08-08) 8 August 1931
Colchester, Essex, England
Education
  • University College London (BSc)
  • St John's College, Cambridge (PhD)
Known for
List of contributions 
Spouses
Joan Isabel Wedge
(m. 1959, divorced)
Vanessa Thomas
(m. 1988)
Children4
FatherLionel Penrose
RelativesRoland Penrose (uncle), Jonathan Penrose (brother), Oliver Penrose (brother), Shirley Hodgson (sister), Antony Penrose (cousin)
Awards
List of awards 
  • Adams Prize (1966)
  • Heineman Prize (1971)
  • Fellow of the Royal Society (1972)
  • Eddington Medal (1975)
  • Royal Medal (1985)
  • Wolf Prize (1988)
  • Dirac Medal (IOP) (1989)
  • Albert Einstein Medal (1990)
  • Naylor Prize and Lectureship (1991)
  • Knight Bachelor (1994)
  • James Scott Prize Lectureship (1997–2000)
  • Karl Schwarzschild Medal (2000)
  • De Morgan Medal (2004)
  • Dalton Medal (2005)
  • Copley Medal (2008)
  • Fonseca Prize (2011)
  • Nobel Prize in Physics (2020)
Scientific career
FieldsMathematical physics, tessellations
Institutions
  • Cornell University
  • Bedford College, London
  • Princeton University
  • Rice University
  • Syracuse University
  • King's College, London
  • Birkbeck, University of London
  • Wadham College, Oxford
  • Polish Academy of Sciences
ThesisTensor Methods in Algebraic Geometry (1957)
Doctoral advisor
John A. Todd
Other academic advisors
W. V. D. Hodge
Doctoral students

Sir Roger Penrose (born 8 August 1931) is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, and philosopher of science. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at 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. He shared the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems, and the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". He proposed the Penrose triangle and corresponded with M. C. Escher, influencing his Waterfall and Ascending and Descending. Penrose's eponymous aperiodic tiling presaged the discovery of quasicrystals by Dan Shechtman.

Penrose won the Royal Society Science Books Prize for The Emperor's New Mind (1989), which outlines his views on physics and consciousness. He followed it with The Road to Reality (2004), billed as "A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe".