The British mathematician and physicist, Sir Roger Penrose (born 1931), made striking and original contributions to the study of geometry, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the human mind.

Roger Penrose was born in Colchester, England, on August 8, 1931. His father was the geneticist Lionel Penrose, an expert on mental defects, whose interest in geometry was communicated to his son. The Penrose family was illustrious in British intellectual life in the 20th century. Jonathan Penrose won the British chess championship ten times in the 1950s and 1960s. It is not surprising that the intellectual life of the Penrose household was lively.

Penrose received his undergraduate degree from University College, London, and then proceeded to Cambridge for his doctorate. While an undergraduate he discovered a theorem concerning conic sections from which some of the basic theorems of projective geometry follow as special cases. As part of his work for his doctorate he rediscovered...