In 1973 Penrose was named the Rouse Ball professor at Oxford University, and in the 1980s he was the Edgar Odell Lovett Professor of Mathematics at Rice University. Penrose's early honors include the 1966 Adams Prize from Cambridge University and the Dannie Heineman Prize for Physics from the American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics in 1971. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1972.
In 1965 Penrose showed that, as a consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity, there must inevitably be points in space that are infinitely dense and hot. At such points--called singularities--the laws of classical physics do not apply; the gravitational field becomes infinite, or other pathological behavior occurs. Penrose's theorem proved that if a star of sufficient mass collapsed, a singularity--the core of what later became known as a black hole--would result. Penrose's work first convinced many physicists of the existence of black holes, and inspired the search for them.
A year later, Stephen Hawking of Cambridge University applied Penrose's theorem to cosmology, proving that the universe started in a singularity. In 1970, Penrose and Hawking, working together, succeeded in proving a singularity theorem much more powerful than their earlier efforts.
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