Princeton University Press author Roger Penrose, has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on black holes. One half of the Prize was awarded to Penrose, with the other half shared by Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez. According to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Penrose was awarded the Prize, “for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity.”

The Academy announcement notes, “Roger Penrose used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity…ten years after Einstein’s death, Roger Penrose proved that black holes really can form and described them in detail; at their heart, black holes hide a singularity in which all the known laws of nature cease. His groundbreaking article is still regarded as the most important contribution to the general theory of relativity since Einstein.”

Penrose is one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists and the winner of the Albert Einstein Medal for his fundamental contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is the bestselling author, with Stephen Hawking, of The Nature of Space and Time (Princeton). With PUP, he is also the author of Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in the New Physics of the Universe. He has contributed forewords to: The Best Writing on Mathematics 2013, edited by Mircea Pitici; Einstein’s Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics, by Albert Einstein and edited by John Stachel; and Fearful Symmetry: The Search for Beauty in Modern Physics, edited by A. Zee. Penrose’s other books include Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe and The Road to Relativity: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (both Vintage). He is the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at the University of Oxford and lives in Oxford, England.