Roger Penrose

Origins and early life

Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, Essex, on 8 August 1931, the son of the geneticist Lionel Penrose and of Margaret Leathes, a physician. His father came from a Quaker family, while his mother's mother, the concert pianist Sonia Marie Natanson, was Jewish, born in Latvia and raised in a strict Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, though she kept her heritage secret; Penrose, an agnostic, told the Jerusalem Post in 2007 that by Jewish rules he could be considered Jewish, though he does not identify as one.

In 1939 the family left for North America, where, after a brief spell at a Quaker school in Philadelphia, he grew up in London, Ontario, his father working at the Ontario Hospital until the war ended.

Work and career

Back in England he took a first-class degree in mathematics at University College London in 1952 and a doctorate in algebraic geometry at Cambridge in 1957, where the cosmologist Dennis Sciama drew him towards physics. A lecture by David Finkelstein in 1959 set him wondering whether the singularity inside a collapsing star would survive without perfect symmetry, and in a paper published in 1965, while at Birkbeck College in London, he proved that it cannot be avoided.

He introduced twistor theory in 1967, extended the singularity theorems to the Big Bang with Stephen Hawking, and in 1974 found the Penrose tilings, two shapes that tile a plane without ever repeating.

Recognition

From 1973 to 1998 he was Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford; he shared the 1988 Wolf Prize in Physics with Hawking, was knighted in 1994, and his books, from The Emperor's New Mind in 1989 to The Road to Reality in 2004, took his ideas to a wide public. In 2020 he received half of the Nobel Prize in Physics, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”, the other half going to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez.