Born #OTD 1931: Roger Penrose, one of the leading mathematical physicists, geometers and cosmologists of the 20th century. With Hawking he developed singularity theorems, and invented non-periodic Penrose tilings. His popular science books are fascinating and mind-expanding.
Kip Thorne: "Penrose revolutionized the mathematical tools that we use to analyze the properties of spacetime". He used unprecedented tools from topology to prove singularities in dying stars (his paper was just 3 pages) and the Big Bang (with Hawking).
In this book "Black Holes and Time Warps", Thorne has a very interesting speculation on why it was a Brit rather than an American who thought of applying topology to astrophysics; because British physics education emphasized advanced mathematics more.
I could not fully understand Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" when I first read it in high school, but it left a great impression on me with its thrilling discussions of quantum mechanics, GΓΆdel's theorems and artificial intelligence. Here was a new universe.
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