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Roger Penrose

Mathematical physicist and philosopher

Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician and physicist who also writes as a philosopher of science. He was a joint winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

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Roger Penrose
Photo: Biswarup Ganguly, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

About Roger Penrose

Sir Roger Penrose was born on 8 August 1931. He is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford and an emeritus fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. In 1988 he and Stephen Hawking were joint winners of the Wolf Prize in Physics, awarded for the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorems. The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics recognized his discovery that the general theory of relativity robustly predicts the formation of black holes. He also proposed the Penrose triangle and corresponded with the artist M. C. Escher. His book The Emperor's New Mind (1989) sets out his views on physics and consciousness, and it won the Royal Society Science Book Prize. He returned to these ideas in Shadows of the Mind and later wrote The Road to Reality, an overview of mathematical physics.

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