Featured Journalism

Patchen Barss on his 3 greatest revelations while writing The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius.

“Long before I began work on The Impossible Man in 2018, I thought of Roger Penrose as a man at the center of two entirely separate mythologies: one as a mathematical physicist who decoded the inner workings of black holes and who forced the physics community to reckon with the limitations of relativity and quantum mechanics; the other as the creator of the impossible Penrose Triangle and the obsession-inducing, never-repeating patterns of Penrose Tiles. While his serious scientific work and his recreational mathematics both embodied a hyper-developed sense of simple, elegant, visual beauty, the two endeavors seemed completely incongruous. How could someone so immersed in esoteric, often fractious scientific arguments also exhibit such joyous, almost child-like wonder at the strange and dazzling ways shapes can fit together?”

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In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane in a pattern that never repeats. In 1982, Daniel Shechtman, an Israeli crystallographer, discovered a metallic alloy whose atoms were organized unlike anything ever observed in materials science. Penrose garnered public renown on […]