More recently, Penrose authored The Emperors New Mind and Shadows Of The Mind, which not only seek to clobber the assumptions of "Strong AI" but more importantly to argue, starting from Kurt Gödel's famous theorem, that we will only be able to understand the workings of the human mind when we have the right equations for quantum gravity. (Or something like that. These two books have certainly expanded my mind, but not nearly enough!)

The Mistakes Of Roger Penrose may have been made up for by his insights into The Geometric Universe we inhabit. The most striking early insight came crossing Tottenham Court Road as it happens.

He's recently released The Road To Reality, which has to be seen as his magnum opus.

From his foreword to The Emperors New Mind:

Since 1973, Penrose has been the Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. The title is appropriate because W.W. Rouse Ball not only was a noted mathematician, he was also an amateur magician with such an ardent interest in recreational mathematics that he wrote the classic English work on this field, Mathematical Recreations and Essays. Penrose shares Ball's enthusiasm for play. In his youth, he discovered an 'impossible object' called a 'tribar'. (An impossible object is a drawing of a solid figure that cannot exist because it embodies self-contradictory elements.) He and his father Lionel, a geneticist, turned the tribar into the Penrose Staircase, a structure that Maurits Escher used in two well-known lithographs: Ascending and Descending and Waterfall. One day when Penrose was lying in bed, in what he called a 'fit of madness', he visualized an impossible object in four-dimensional space. It is something, he said, that a four-space creature, if it came across it, would exclaim 'My God, what's that?'

During the 1960s, when Penrose worked on cosmology with his friend Stephen Hawking, he made what is perhaps his best known discovery. If relativity theory holds 'all the way down', there must be a singularity in every black hole where the laws of physics no longer apply. Even this achievement has been eclipsed in recent years by Penrose's construction of two shapes that can tile the plane, in the manner of an Escher tessellation, but aperiodically. Penrose invented them, or rather discovered them, without any expectation they would be useful. To everybody's astonishment it turned out that three-dimensional forms of his tiles may underlie a strange new form of matter. Studying these 'quasicrystals' is now one of the most active research areas in crystallography. It is also the most dramatic instance in modern times of how playful mathematics can have unanticipated applications.

Penrose's achievements in mathematics and physics - and I have touched on only a small fraction - spring from a lifelong sense of wonder towards the mystery and beauty of being. His little finger tells him that the human mind is more that just a collection of tiny wires and switches ... Many of Penrose's opinions are infused with humour, but this one is no laughing matter.

Penrose was on in the summer of 2000 on BBC Radio 4, interviewed by the lovely and perceptive Sue Lawley. He has been devoted to the music of JS Bach all of his life. He's just [when?] had another baby, with the help of his wife, in his late sixties. His relationship with his own father and mother are also fascinating. After Penrose junior came back from meeting Maurits Cornelius Escher for the first time, father and son designed the impossible staircase together and sent it to Escher, who used it in his famous etching Ascending and Descending.

Unlike his father, Penrose eschews male dominance and wifely subordination and tends to avoid controversy if he can. He says he was genuinely surprised by the strength of feeling from the AI community over The Emperors New Mind and Shadows Of The Mind. But he does feel passionately about the truth, with all the dogged determination of other famous Hard Core Platonists [Wiki's term rather than his]. Lastly, although Penrose Crystals make great non-stick frying pans, you can't fry eggs in them. There's something about non-periodic crystals and eggs that just don't go together. -- Richard Drake