A modern bridge between the worlds of physics and mathematics, Sir Roger Penrose was an important contributor to theories on black holes in the 1960s and today is a fixture in the arcane world of recreational mathematics. His particular area of interest is a field of geometry known as tesselation, which involves evenly covering a surface with tiles of predetermined shape. Penrose is famous for his invention, with his father, of the Penrose impossible staircase and the Penrose triangle (also called the "tribar"). He also created what are now known as Penrose tilings.
Penrose was born in Colchester, England on August 8, 1931, the son of a geneticist who was an expert on inherited mental defects. His mother was a medical doctor. Because of his upbringing, Penrose was originally more interested in medicine and biology than mathematics. However, school scheduling conflicts forced him to decide early on that mathematics was his greater love. He received his higher education at University College in London, obtaining his doctorate in algebraic geometry from Cambridge University in 1957.
From 1957 to 1966, Penrose held numerous temporary academic posts at schools in London, Cambridge, Princeton, Syracuse, and Texas, working as both a lecturer and a researcher. In 1966, London's Birkbeck College gave him his first appointment as full professor. During the mid-1960s, Penrose began experimenting with the development of a new cosmology based on a complex geometry that he invented as he went along. His first efforts involved what he called "twistors," objects with no mass and with both angular and linear momentum in their special kind of space. His main goal in using these objects was to reconstruct modern physics.
Also in the mid-1960s, Penrose and physicist Stephen Hawking proved part of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity to show that at the center of black holes there exist a "space-time singularity" of infinite density and zerovolume where our present laws of physics do not apply. On his own, Penrose came up with his theory of "cosmic censorship," which states that such singularities must have an "event horizon" that would effectively conceal any information about the black hole. In 1969, Penrose suggested theoretical circumstances in which energy, which normally would be trapped by the black hole's crushing gravity, might be extracted from a Kerr black hole (an uncharged rotating body). In 1970, he and Hawking argued that our universe probably started as a singularity that initiated the famous "Big Bang."
In 1973, Penrose left Birkbeck College for Oxford University, which had appointed him a distinguished professor of mathematics. The following year, he introduced Penrose tiling, which is unique in that it uses quasi-symmetrical (nonrepeating) tile shapes to cover a surface. Penrose found that computers were useless for this sort of application, so he reportedly did his research with only a notebook and pencil. His other creations, the staircase and the tribar, figured prominently in the revolutionary art of Maurits Cornelius Escher.
Penrose and Hawking shared the prestigious 1988 Wolf Prize for Physics, and in 1994 Penrose received a knighthood for his work in mathematics and physics. He continues to work as the Rouse-Ball mathematics professor at Oxford University. On his homepage at Oxford, Penrose sums up his feelings about mathematics, saying, "Mathematics is beautiful and elegant as well as being fun and yielding insights about ourselves and our world. Mathematics should be taught in a way that communicates this fullness."
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