The mathematician who proved black holes must form also inspired Escher
As a student in 1954, Roger Penrose wandered into an Escher exhibition in Amsterdam and started drawing impossible objects. His triangle and endless staircase, sent to Escher, inspired the Dutch artist's Waterfall. Decades later Penrose won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for showing black holes are a robust prediction of Einstein's relativity.
Born in Colchester on 8 August 1931, he grew up in a family thick with talent: a psychiatrist and geneticist father, Lionel, a physicist brother, a chess grandmaster brother and the artist Roland Penrose as an uncle. During the Second World War the boy lived in Canada, where his father worked in Ontario. George Gamow's Mr Tompkins stories, read to him young, fired a lifelong love of physics. He took a first in mathematics at University College London in 1952 and a Cambridge PhD in algebraic geometry in 1957.
The cosmologist Dennis Sciama pulled him toward astrophysics. Before 1964, relativists could solve Einstein's equations only for highly symmetrical cases, and nobody knew whether those were typical. Penrose's radical move was to set aside detailed geometry and study the overall structure of spacetime; Kip Thorne credits him with revolutionising the mathematical tools of the field. The work led to the singularity theorems, for which he shared the 1988 Wolf Prize with Stephen Hawking, and to his cosmic censorship conjecture of 1969.
His range is startling. In 1974 he found tilings built from just two shapes that cover a plane without ever repeating, the first with fivefold symmetry, and in 1984 the same patterns turned up in the atoms of quasicrystals. He invented twistor theory in 1967, spin networks in 1971 that later fed into loop quantum gravity, and popularised the causal diagrams that carry his name. As a doctoral student he even revived a matrix technique now called the Moore-Penrose inverse.
He enjoys bold, contested ideas. His prize-winning book The Emperor's New Mind set out his views on physics and consciousness. In 2010 he reported concentric circles in cosmic microwave background data that he read as possible traces of a universe before the Big Bang, part of his conformal cyclic cosmology, in which he argues the Big Bang singularity may be only apparent.
Source: Roger Penrose
