Roger Penrose was born in Colchester in 1931, a medium-sized British town in the English county of Essex, 80 kilometres northeast of London. His mother was a doctor, while his father, Lionel, was a renowned geneticist whose research had clarified the genetic causes of intellectual disability. In 1939, he travelled to the United States with his family to present his work. Sensing that war was coming, he chose to remain in North America; and so young Roger found himself attending school in London… Ontario! It was there that his passion for mathematics emerged, apparently stimulated more by his family environment than by the teaching he received.
General relativity, quantum physics and mathematical logic ---------------------------------------------------------------
At the end of the war, the Penrose family settled in London, where Roger began studying at University College School. Although his father wanted him to pursue biology, he chose mathematics and entered St John’s College, Cambridge. Algebra and geometry were his favourite subjects. While still a student, he built on the work of the American mathematician Eliakim Hastings Moore (1862–1932) to extend the notion of an inverse to rectangular matrices. This concept of a generalized inverse, or Moore–Penrose pseudoinverse, now familiar to every engineer, is useful for finding approximate solutions to linear systems.
Yet other subjects fascinated him: "I remember going to three courses, none of which had anything to do with the research I was supposed to be doing. One was a course by Hermann Bondi on general relativity, which was fascinating. […] Another was a course by Paul Dirac on quantum mechanics, which was magnificent. […] And the third […] was a course on mathematical logic by Steen. I learned about Turing machines and Gödel’s theorem."
This quotation reveals Penrose’s eclectic mind and already points towards the path he would follow, applying mathematics to our understanding of the universe. His restless mind increasingly sought to explore the mathematical foundations of real-world problems. During this period, he began studying tilings and discovering non-periodic examples, initially involving a large number of tiles—a number he would later seek to reduce.