Roger Penrose

Have you ever imagined a place so strong that nothing — not even light — can escape? Picture a dark whirlpool in space. Meet Sir Roger Penrose, a British mathematician and physicist born in 1931. In the 1960s he used clever geometry and surprising new ideas to show that Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity could create these whirlpools, which we call black holes.

Before Penrose, black holes were mostly strange equations on paper. Penrose proved that when very heavy stars run out of fuel, gravity can squeeze them until space and time bend wildly and a 'singularity' forms — a point of extreme gravity. He invented clever ways to draw and reason about space to make this proof. His 1965 singularity theorem convinced many scientists that black holes were real and led to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Because of Penrose’s work, astronomers had confidence to search for black holes. Later, telescopes took the first image of a black hole’s shadow and detectors felt ripples from colliding black holes — evidence that matched the ideas Penrose helped prove. He also discovered beautiful non-repeating patterns called Penrose tilings and wrote books that explain big ideas. His story shows how deep thinking and simple drawings can change how we see the universe. Keep wondering and exploring!