Roger Penrose

Roger Penrose, OM, FRS, born 8 August 1931 in Colchester Essex U.K., obtained his B.Sc. (1952, in mathematics) at University College London, and Ph.D. (1957, in algebraic geometry) at St John's College, Cambridge. He held several teaching and research positions in the UK and USA, particularly Birkbeck College London, becoming Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University in 1973, retiring in 1998, and he is now Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor. He is also Francis and Helen Pentz Distinguished (visiting) Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Penn State University, USA (from 1993) and is a Visiting Professor (of physics) at Queen Mary, University of London (from 2006). He is married (to Vanessa 1988, who teaches mathematics at Abingdon School, Oxfordshire) with one son (Max 2000). (There are three other sons from a previous marriage.)

He was elected FRS in 1972, knighted in 1994 for services to science, and obtained the Order of Merit in 2000. He has fourteen honorary degrees, has been elected to four foreign national scientific organizations, including USA's National Academy of Sciences, and has been made a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He won numerous awards, including American Physical Society's Dannie Heinemann Prize 1971, Royal Astronomical Society's Eddington Medal (with Stephen Hawking) 1975, Royal Society's Royal Medal 1985, Israel's Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics 1988 (with Stephen Hawking), the U.K. Institute of Physics's Dirac Medal and Prize 1989, the Albert Einstein Gesellschaft's Einstein Medal 1990, the London Mathematical Society's Naylor Prize 1991, and its DeMorgan Medal in 2004, the Italian Society for General Relativity and Gravitation's first Amaldi Medal 2004, and the Dalton Medal in 2005.

He has written many scientific papers and several books, including three technical books: “Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity”, “Spinors and Space-Time” (with Wolfgang Rindler), volumes 1 and 2, and several semi-popular books “The Emperor's New Mind: On Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics”, which won the 1990 Science Book Prize, “Shadows of the mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness”, “The Nature of Space and Time” (with Stephen Hawking), and “The Large, the Small and The Human Mind”. Recently published is The “Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe”.

Research interests include various aspects of physics and geometry, with many contributions to general relativity theory (e.g. theorems demonstrating inevitability of spacetime singularities in black holes and big bang, under very general circumstances, and the introduction of spinor and conformal techniques), to the foundations of quantum theory (with a specific proposal for a level of failure of quantum linear superposition), to the introduction of a generalized inverse of matrices, to the theory of non-periodic tilings (including the first examples involving only two distinct tiles, which probably underlie the atomic arrangements of certain quasi-crystals), to the physical basis of consciousness (including a moderately specific quantum-theoretic scheme, with S.Hameroff). He originated twistor theory, a proposal for uniting quantum ideas with space-time structure (which has recently found significant application in high-energy physics, in a string-related proposal of E.Witten) and spin-network theory, which plays a significant role in the loop-variable approach to quantum gravity. He has made contributions to cosmology, most notably in relation to the geometrical nature of the big bang and its fundamental role in the second law of thermodynamics, and he has proposed a “conformal cylic cosmology” dependent on this idea and on the presence of a positive cosmological constant.