UCL alumnus Professor Roger Penrose awarded Nobel Prize

Professor Roger Penrose, who was an undergraduate at UCL, is among three scientists to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for work relating to black holes. Professor Penrose, an Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, was awarded the prize, the committee said, for his discovery that "black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity". The other half of the prize went to Professors Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy". Professor Penrose, born in 1931, graduated with a first-class Mathematics degree at UCL in 1952 before studying for his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge. After a series of academic positions in the UK and the US, in 1973 he was appointed Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, becoming Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics 25 years later, in 1998. He was made an Honorary Fellow of UCL in 1975. In January 1965, ten years after Albert Einstein's death, Professor Penrose proved that black holes really could form and described them in detail - as singularities in which all the known laws of nature cease.