Roger Penrose

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 Dan Shechtman's discovery of quasicrystals.

Penrose won the Royal Society Science Book Prize for The Emperor's New Mind (1989), which outlines his views on physics and consciousness. He expanded on these ideas in Shadows of the Mind (1994) and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (1997), the latter written with Stuart Hameroff. His The Road to Reality, (2004), billed as "A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe", is an overview of mathematical physics.