Roger Penrose

person · earth

British mathematical physicist whose 1965 singularity theorem changed the status of black holes from a suspicious feature of idealised calculations to a generic prediction of general relativity. His innovation was methodological: instead of solving the equations for a specific collapsing configuration, he introduced the notion of a trapped surface and argued globally and topologically, so that the conclusion did not depend on assuming spherical symmetry. He went on to describe the process by which rotational energy can be extracted from a spinning black hole, to propose the cosmic censorship conjecture, and to develop the diagrammatic methods that made causal structure tractable. He was awarded half of the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics; the other half was shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the stellar-orbit measurements at the Galactic centre. Not a place.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.