United Kingdom
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Roger Penrose
said
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
English mathematical physicist, recreational mathematician and philosopher
- Fame64.9
- Momentum0.9
- Scientists rank#175
Source-basedStable
- Fame64.9
- Momentum0.9
- Scientists rank#175
- Wikipedia71.8K
Born 1931 · age 95United Kingdom
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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.
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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…
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Roger Penrose
said
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
said
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
said
I have been arguing that such 'God-given' mathematical ideas should have some kind of timeless existence, independent of our earthly selves.
— Ch. 3, Mathematics and reality, p. 97.
Roger Penrose
said
Gödel's theorem shows that this point of view is not really a tenable one in a fundamental philosophy of mathematics.
— Ch. 4, Truth, proof, and insight, p. 112.
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Stable64.9
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
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Momentum0.9
Historical26.6
Source confidence70.0
Completeness80.0
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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