Sir Roger Penrose

A mathematician among physicists.

1931 - Born in Colchester, England.
1952 - He was awarded first class degree in mathematics from University of London.
1955 - Reintroduced the E. H. Moore generalised matrix inverse, also known as the "Moore–Penrose inverse."
1958 - Roger and his father published article in British Journal of Psychology, about impossible figures, popularly known as "Penrose triangle" and "Penrose staircase."
1958 - Finished his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge, with a thesis on "tensor methods in algebraic geometry".
1959 - He married Joan Isabel Wedge.
1971 - Developed a method of mapping the regions of space-time surrounding a black hole. Such a map, which is called a "Penrose diagram", allows one to visualize the effects of gravitation upon an entity approaching a black hole.
1974 - Discovered "Penrose tiling", in which a set of shapes can be used to cover a plane without using a repeating pattern.
1994 - Was knighted for services to science.
2004 - Published "The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe," considered one of his best books.
2008 - Received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 2008.
2020 - Was awarded one half of the Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity, a half-share also going to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.

"Sometimes it's the detours which turn out to be the fruitful ideas."
-- Sir Roger Penrose