“The Impossible Man,” by Patchen Barss, depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexi

The Needy Genius Who Understood the Cosmos (People, Not So Much)

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2024-11-14 04:00:05

“The Impossible Man,” by Patchen Barss, depicts the British mathematical physicist and Nobelist Sir Roger Penrose in all his iconoclastic complexity.

The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician father; a model of one of the Penroses’ “impossible objects” — a staircase on which a person could ascend or descend forever.

But maybe the most extraordinary item is also the most ordinary: a four-pack of Kleenex Quilted Peach Toilet Tissue. The quilting was based on one of Penrose’s non-repeating tiling patterns in order to avoid “nesting,” which would have risked stuck squares and unsightly bulges in the roll — yet nobody from Kleenex had consulted Penrose. In 1997, Pentaplex, a company set up to develop commercial applications of his work, sued the toilet paper’s manufacturer, Kimberly Clark. As a Pentaplex director announced at the time: “When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission, then a last stand must be made.”

After the case was settled out of court, “Penrose tiles never again surprised anyone entering the loo,” writes Patchen Barss in “The Impossible Man,” his new biography of Sir Roger. Barss spent lots of in-person time with Penrose, 93, and spoke to him by video chat or phone almost every week for five years. While the toilet paper episode had a happy ending, many of the others in this book do not. “He was consistently willing to respond to my questions,” writes Barss in an author’s note, “even when the answers were difficult or painful.”

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