By Cirone-Musi, Festival della Scienza, CC BY-SA 2.0,
Sir Roger Penrose is an English mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher and Nobel Laureate in Physics. University of Oxford – Nobel Laureate Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus Fellow, Wadham College University of Oxford United Kingdom. Roger Penrose was born, August 8, 1931, in Colchester Essex UK. He earned a 1st class mathematics degree at University College London; a Ph.D. at Cambridge UK, and became assistant lecturer, Bedford College London, Research Fellow St John’s College, Cambridge (now Honorary Fellow), a post-doc at King’s College London, NATO Fellow at Princeton, Syracuse, and Cornell Universities, USA. He also served a 1-year appointment at University of Texas, became a Reader then full Professor at Birkbeck College, London, and Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, Oxford University (during which he served several ½-year periods as Mathematics Professor at Rice University, Houston, Texas). He is now Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor, Fellow, Wadham College, Oxford (now Emeritus Fellow).
He has received many awards and honorary degrees, including knighthood, Fellow of the Royal Society and of the US National Academy of Sciences, the De Morgan Medal of London Mathematical Society, the Copley Medal of the Royal Society, the Wolf Prize in mathematics (shared with Stephen Hawking), the Pomeranchuk Prize (Moscow), and one half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics, the other half shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. He has designed many non-periodic tiling patterns including a large paving at entrance of Andrew Wiles Mathematics Building, Oxford, and the Transbay Center, San Francisco, California. Sir Roger is widely acclaimed for fundamental advances in understanding the universe. His 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics was bestowed for showing that black holes are robust predictions of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Roger has also proposed a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics (“objective reduction”, “OR”), which he suggests is also the origin of consciousness, leading to a theory of brain function (“orchestrated objective reduction”, “Orch OR”). And Roger’s concept of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (“CCC”) posits a serial, eternal universe, with the Big Bang preceded by a previous aeon which had its own Big Bang, that aeon preceded by another and so on.
