Long before I began work on The Impossible Man in 2018, I thought of Roger Penrose as a man at the center of two entirely separate mythologies: one as

Patchen Barss on the Genius of Roger Penrose

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2024-11-26 12:00:03

Long before I began work on The Impossible Man in 2018, I thought of Roger Penrose as a man at the center of two entirely separate mythologies: one as a mathematical physicist who decoded the inner workings of black holes and who forced the physics community to reckon with the limitations of relativity and quantum mechanics; the other as the creator of the impossible Penrose Triangle and the obsession-inducing, never-repeating patterns of Penrose Tiles. While his serious scientific work and his recreational mathematics both embodied a hyper-developed sense of simple, elegant, visual beauty, the two endeavors seemed completely incongruous. How could someone so immersed in esoteric, often fractious scientific arguments also exhibit such joyous, almost child-like wonder at the strange and dazzling ways shapes can fit together?

Penrose had learned from his father—a renowned geneticist who made his own jigsaw puzzles and carved wooden toys that mimicked the process of self-replication—that work and play go hand in hand. It’s often impossible to determine which one he was engaged in at any given time. The subject matter that delighted and fascinated Penrose—complex numbers, conformal geometry, unexpected simplicity, and the instinct that beautiful theories were more likely to be correct—crisscrossed through his peer-reviewed papers and his puzzles, games, and mathematical oddities.