Roger Penrose

Born in Colchester, Essex, Roger Penrose is a son of Margaret (née Leathes), a physician, and Lionel Penrose, a psychiatrist and geneticist. His paternal grandparents were J. Doyle Penrose, an Irish-born painter, and the Hon. Elizabeth Josephine Peckover, daughter of Alexander Peckover, 1st Baron Peckover; his maternal grandparents were John Beresford Leathes, a physiologist, and Sonia Marie Natanson, a concert pianist. His uncle was the artist Sir Roland Penrose, whose son with the American photographer Lee Miller is Antony Penrose. Penrose is the brother of the physicist Oliver Penrose, of the geneticist Shirley Hodgson and of the chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose. Their stepfather was the mathematician and computer scientist Max Newman. He found inspiration in George Gamow's Mr. Tompkins books: "I remember reading (or being read) the Tompkins stories as a quite young child, and I'm sure that their magic was responsible, to a very considerable extent, for the great excitement that fundamental physics has held for me for the rest of my life."

Penrose spent the Second World War in Canada where his father worked in London, Ontario, at the Ontario Hospital and Western University. Penrose studied at University College School. He then attended University College London, where he obtained a BSc degree with First Class Honours in mathematics in 1952.

In 1955, Penrose reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the Moore–Penrose inverse, after it had been reinvented by Arne Bjerhammar in 1951. Having started research under the professor of geometry and astronomy W. V. D. Hodge, Penrose received his PhD in algebraic geometry at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1957, with his thesis "Tensor Methods in Algebraic Geometry" supervised by the algebraist and geometer John A. Todd. He devised and popularised the Penrose triangle in collaboration with his father, describing it as "impossibility in its purest form". He corresponded with the artist M. C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. Escher's Waterfall and Ascending and Descending were in turn inspired by Penrose.

As a student in 1954, Penrose was attending a conference in Amsterdam when by chance he came across an exhibition of Escher's work. …

Penrose spent the academic year 1956–57 as an assistant lecturer at Bedford College (now Royal Holloway, University of London) and was a research fellow at St John's College, Cambridge. Before the fellowship ended Penrose won a NATO Research Fellowship for 1959–61, first at Princeton University and then at Syracuse University. Returning to the University of London, Penrose spent 1961–1963 as a researcher at King's College, London, before returning to the United States to spend 1963–64 as a visiting associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He later held visiting positions at Yeshiva University, Princeton and Cornell University during 1966–67 and 1969.

Dennis Sciama drew his attention from mathematics to physics. In 1964, while a reader at Birkbeck College, Penrose, per Kip Thorne, "revolutionised the mathematical tools that we use to analyse the properties of spacetime". Until then, work on the curved geometry of general relativity had been confined to configurations with sufficiently high symmetry for Einstein's equations to be solvable explicitly, and there was doubt about whether such cases were typical. One approach to this issue was by the use of perturbation theory, as developed under the leadership of John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton. The other, and more radically innovative, approach initiated by Penrose was to overlook the detailed geometrical structure of spacetime and instead concentrate attention just on the topology of the space, or at most its conformal structure, since it is the latter – as determined by the lay of the lightcones – that determines the trajectories of lightlike geodesics, and hence their causal relationships. The importance of Penrose's paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" (summarised roughly as that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form a singularity) was not its only result. …

Penrose married Joan Isabel Penrose (née Wedge) in 1959. They had three sons. Penrose is now married to Vanessa Thomas, director of Academic Development at Cokethorpe School in Witney, Oxfordshire, and former head of mathematics at Abingdon School. They have one son. Penrose is a devotee of Johann Sebastian Bach. On Desert Island Discs, he said he was tempted to choose an all Bach playlist. His first choice was the Mass in B minor.

Penrose stated, "I don't believe in established religions of any kind." He regards himself as an agnostic. In Errol Morris's A Brief History of Time (1991) he said, "I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it's not somehow just there by chance ... some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along—it's a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it."

Regarding consciousness, he says "There is something going on which might resonate with a religious perspective. ... The presence of consciousness is not an accident. It certainly has connections with a view that people often have, that you have these constants of Nature, and nobody knows where they come from, and if they didn't have the particular values that they have, we wouldn't have interesting chemistry, we wouldn't have life."

In 2010, Oxford University Press published Penroses's Collected works volumes 1 through 6, with over 5000 pages spanning 50 years.

His deep work on General Relativity has been a major factor in our understanding of black holes. His development of Twistor Theory has produced a beautiful and productive approach to the classical equations of mathematical physics. His tilings of the plane underlie the newly discovered quasi-crystals.