The Heilbronn Institute offers its congratulations to Sir Roger Penrose on his award of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics. This award is shared with Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for their work on black holes, Sir Roger specifically awarded “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity”.

In his 1965 paper “Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities”, Sir Roger predicted the existence of black holes, astronomical objects so dense that the geometry of space-time becomes singular inside them and not even light can escape their gravitational attraction. Sir Roger used new approaches, including topological tools, to discover the consequences of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity.

Sir Roger is currently Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford.