Dr. Roger Penrose — Profile, Specialty, Credentials & Public Visibility

Summary

Updated 2026-06-21

He proved black holes are inevitable under Einstein's equations — work that earned him a Nobel fifty years after he changed how physics sees gravity's final act.

Biography

About

Born 8 August 1931, Penrose built his career at Oxford, where he became Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics. In 1988 he shared the Wolf Prize with Stephen Hawking for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems; the 2020 Nobel followed for showing that black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity. Along the way he invented the Penrose triangle, corresponded with M. C. Escher (shaping Waterfall and Ascending and Descending), and devised an aperiodic tiling that preceded the discovery of quasicrystals. His 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind won the Royal Society Science…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose

saidMar 2007

Does life in some way make use of the potentiality for vast quantum superpositions, as would be required for serious quantum computation?

— Foreword (March 2007) to Quantum Aspects of Life (2008), by Derek Abbott.

Roger Penrose

said2002

Understanding is, after all, what science is all about — and science is a great deal more than mindless computation.

— As quoted in The Golden Ratio : The Story of Phi, the World's Most Astonishing Number (2002) by Mario Livio, p. 201.

Roger Penrose

said1997

There are two other words I do not understand — awareness and intelligence. Well, why am I talking about things when I do not know what they really mean?

— The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997).

Roger Penrose

said1989