Roger Penrose

Biography

British mathematical physicist who held the Rouse Ball Chair of Mathematics at Oxford from 1973 to 1998. His work in general relativity and cosmology — above all the singularity theorems written with Stephen Hawking — laid the groundwork for the study of black holes and led to the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. The Emperor's New Mind (1989) used Godel's theorem to argue that human mind is non-algorithmic, making it one of the most important counter-arguments to strong AI; he later developed the Orchestrated Objective Reduction hypothesis with Stuart Hameroff.