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Roger Penrose

File:Roger_Penrose_at_Festival_della_Scienza_Oct_29_2011.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Roger Penrose

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Also known as R. Penrose, Sir Roger Penrose

English mathematical physicist, recreational mathematician and philosopher

AI overview

Roger Penrose is an English mathematical physicist and philosopher who has made significant contributions to understanding the nature of space, time, and the universe. His work matters because it has fundamentally shaped modern theoretical physics and continues to influence how scientists think about gravity, black holes, and the nature of consciousness itself.

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Nobel Prize

  • The Nobel Prize in Physics2020

    for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity

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Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Given name
Roger
Gender
male
Citizenship
United Kingdom
Place of birth
Colchester
Occupation
astrophysicist
Languages spoken
English language
Religion
agnosticism
Noble title
Knight Bachelor
Academic degree
Doctor of Science
Doctoral advisor
J. A. Todd
Field of work
mathematics
Image
Roger Penrose 9560.JPG
Show 11 more facts
Commons category
Roger Penrose
date of birth
1931-08-08
Erdős number
3
name in native language
Roger Penrose
honorific prefix
Sir
maintained by WikiProject
WikiProject Mathematics
influenced by
Dennis W. Sciama
social media followers
2225
interested in
physics
Sources (7)

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Encyclopedic overview

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".

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Roger Penrose” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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