Biography

Holds the position of Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University since 1973. At Oxford, Penrose has been working on 'twistor theory' in which the four dimensions of space-time are quantized by imaginary numbers as opposed to real numbers.

Penrose was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1972 and a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1998. He has earned many prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize, which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their understanding of the universe, the Dannie Heinemann Prize, the Royal Society Royal Medal, the Dirac Medal, and the Albert Einstein prize. In 1994 he was knighted for services to science.

In 1958, Penrose and his father, geneticist Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898-1972), for fun published the article "Impossible Objects: A Special Type of Visual Illusion" (British Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, 1958, pp. 31-33), describing two impossible objects: the impossible tri-bar and the impossible staircase. M.C. Escher used the structure of the staircase in his well-known lithograph "Ascending and Descending" and the Penrose impossible triangle as the basis of his lithograph "Waterfall."

Penrose's hypothesis of 'cosmic censorship' states that, within an event horizon (the interface between a black hole and space-time), little or no radiation or information can escape, so that some events remain hidden to observers outside the black hole. Penrose argued that all singularities are so hidden, which is now widely accepted.

English mathematician who formulated some of the fundamental theorems that describe black holes, including the singularity theorems, developed jointly with Stephen Hawking, which state that once the gravitational collapse of a star has proceeded to a certain degree, singularities (which form the center of black holes) are inevitable.