A singular mind: Roger Penrose on his Nobel Prize

Sir Roger Penrose was at school when he realised that his mind worked in an unusual way. ‘I thought, maybe when I go to university, I’ll find people who think like me,’ he tells me, at the beginning of what was to be a fascinating conversation, stretching long into the afternoon. ‘But it wasn’t like that at all. When I would talk to someone about an idea, I found myself not understanding a word they were saying.’

Just after we spoke, in early December, Penrose received the Nobel Prize in Physics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that he should think a little differently. But, as he explained it to me, his mind is unusually visual. Penrose’s father Lionel was an artist as well as a psychiatrist and mathematician, and a great influence on Roger. Father and son used to go for long walks together in search of things to draw. ‘I liked to do realistic pictures, but sometimes I would branch out and do more surrealistic things. I would fill my notebooks with all sorts of distorted pictures and interlocking faces and goodness knows what,’ says Penrose. But this meant trouble in exams. ‘If you’re doing algebra, you just write down the answer. But for geometric or visual work, you have to translate it into words. That takes time. Often the visual people literally don’t finish the papers. The result is that algebraic people do better in exams, so you find more of them at universities.’ On the upside, the tendency to work through mathematics with the aid of a mental image has contributed to some of his most important breakthroughs, including his Nobel-winning work on black holes.

The term ‘black hole’ refers to a massive object that warps space-time to the extent that nothing, not even light, can escape. At its centre is a point called a singularity, where the density is infinite and physics itself breaks down.