Only 33 years old when he was appointed as Reader (and later Professor) of mathematics, Penrose was a leading person in the Birkbeck community until he left nine years later. His publication of “Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities” in 1965 was ground-breaking in its proof that a singularity in space-time would occur in the gravitational collapse of a massive star. He began his collaboration with Stephen Hawking while at Birkbeck, demonstrating that a singularity applied to the origin of the whole universe in the Big Bang. 

Penrose combined quantum mechanics with consciousness and gravity. Non-computability was crucial to his thinking. He was influenced by Bohm’s EPR paradox, which helped Penrose develop his “twistors” theory, or a non-local description of massless quantum particles. 

In 1988, he was awarded the Wolf Foundation Prize for Physics alongside Hawking, the most prestigious award in physics after the Nobel Prize. Penrose was later awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on gravitational collapse and space-time singularities, an idea that had first come to him when walking to his office in Birkbeck decades earlier.