Roger Penrose Keynote Speaker

British mathematician, physicist and philosopher of science
Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics, and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, at the University of Oxford
Winner of the The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 for "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity"

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Roger Penrose's Biography

Professor Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS, is a British mathematician, mathematical physicist, philosopher of science and Nobel Laureate, known for his work on general relativity and cosmology. He is an impressive and engaging speaker on physics and mathematics.

He is is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. Roger is an honourary fellow of Cambridge University’s St John’s College and University College London.

In the 1960’s, alongside Stephen Hawking, he proved that all matter within a black hole collapses to a singularity, a geometric point in space where mass is compressed to infinite density and zero volume. He proposed critical mathematical tools to describe black holes in detail and used Einstein’s general theory of relativity to show that black holes forming is a natural process in the universe’s development.

In 2020, he won The Nobel Prize in Physics for “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”. Alongside Stephen Hawking, he was awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics 1988 for their work on the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, and they were joint recipients of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Eddington Medal in 1975. Other awards include the Commandino Medal, Urbino University (2017), the Richard R. Ernst Medal, ETH Zurich (2012), the Fonseca Prize, University of Santiago de Compostela (2011) and the Copley Medal (2008).

He graduated from University College London with a first class degree in mathematics. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from Warsaw University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and the University of York.