Sir Roger Penrose, mathematician and physicist
By Joseph Lane (Year 8)
Last year I saw the film “The Theory of Everything” about Stephen Hawking. One of the main characters was Roger Penrose, a physicist who had inspired Stephen Hawking. Last summer I went to Dulwich Picture Gallery to see the superb exhibition of Escher’s drawings. I noticed the name Roger Penrose, who had inspired Escher to draw some of his fantastic optical illusions.
Having seen Roger Penrose’s name twice in short succession, I decided to find out who he was. My research found he was one of the most brilliant mathematicians and physicists of the 20 th century.
Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, England on August 8 th 1931, and he started as a mathematician, being awarded a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry from Cambridge University in 1957. Whilst at Cambridge he became interested in geometric patterns and whether a set of shapes could be found which could tile a surface without any gaps or overlap but also without generating
a repeating pattern. His initial solution required many thousands of tiles of different shapes, but after many years of research, he reduced the number of different shapes needed to six, and then ultimately to two.
Together with his father Lionel, Penrose created the impossible triangle known as the Tribar and the Penrose staircase which rises endlessly but always returns to the same level, which were illustrated and made famous by Escher.
By the time that Penrose was awarded his Ph.D. he had become interested in physics. He discovered that algebraic geometry could be used to explain Einstein’s relativity theories. Virtually overnight one of the world’s leading mathematicians became one of the world’s leading physicists.
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