It is an understatement to describe the British mathematical physicist and philosopher Sir Roger Penrose as a great thinker. The Oxford professor’s preternatural intuitions about geometry and the universe — especially the nature of black holes — have earned him a 2020 Nobel Prize for physics (and perhaps should have won him a second, for chemistry); a knighthood; and an Order of Merit, perhaps the most exclusive of Britain’s honours, limited to 24 living holders.
Some believe that the late Stephen Hawking — a colleague and in some senses a rival — rode on Penrose’s coat-tails; Lee Smolin, a leading theoretical physicist, believes Penrose to be “the most important person who worked on [relativity] after Einstein.” His mathematical legacy includes Penrose diagrams, Penrose tiling (particular ways of fitting geometric shapes together without gaps or overlaps) and Penrose notation, a kind of mathematical shorthand for quantum theory.