Oliver Penrose

British theoretical physicist

Oliver Penrose
Born	(1929-06-06) 6 June 1929 (age 94) Marylebone, London, England
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University College, London King's College, Cambridge
Known for	Bose–Einstein condensation in liquid helium direction of time kinetics of phase transitions foundations of statistical mechanics
Scientific career
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Imperial College, London Open University Heriot-Watt University
Doctoral advisor	H N V Temperley

Website	www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~oliver/
Notes
He is the brother of Roger Penrose, Jonathan Penrose, and Shirley Hodgson, and son of Lionel Penrose, and grandson of J. Doyle Penrose and John Beresford Leathes. He is the nephew of Roland Penrose and cousin of Antony Penrose.

Oliver Penrose FRS FRSE (born 6 June 1929) is a British theoretical physicist.^[1]

He is the son of the scientist Lionel Penrose and brother of the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose, and geneticist Shirley Hodgson.^[2]^[3] He was associated with the Open University for seventeen years and was a Professor of Mathematics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh from 1986 until his retirement in 1994. He has the title of Professor Emeritus at Heriot-Watt, and remains active in research there. His topics of interest include statistical mechanics,^[4] phase transitions in metals and the physical chemistry of surfactants. His concept of off-diagonal long-range order is important to the present understanding of superfluids and superconductors. Other more abstract topics in which he has worked include understanding the physical basis for the direction of time and interpretations of quantum mechanics.^[5]^[6]

References

^ "Notes", The rainbow and the worm: the physics of organisms by Mae-Wan Ho, World Scientific, 1998, Pg. 77
^ Image processing III: mathematical methods, algorithms and applications by Jonathan M. Blackledge and Martin J. Turner, Horwood Publishing, 2001, Pg. 2
^ "The Mandelbrot Set", Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science by E. Brian Davies, Oxford University Press, 2010, Pg. 119, ISBN 0191591564
^ "Papers dedicated to Oliver Penrose on the occasion of his 65th birthday", Volume 77, Issues 1–2 of Journal of Statistical Physics
^ "Quantum Mechanics and Real Events", Quantum chaos—quantum measurement by Predrag Cvitanović, Ian Percival, Andreas Wirzba and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Scientific Affairs Division, Springer, 1992, Pg. 257
^ "The physical review—the first hundred years:" a selection of seminal papers and commentaries, Volume 1 by H. Henry Stroke, Springer, 1995

Books

Coauthored books

The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking) (1996)
The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Hawking) (1997)
White Mars or, The Mind Set Free (with Brian W. Aldiss) (1999)

Academic works

Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity (1972)
Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 1, Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields (with Wolfgang Rindler) (1987)
Spinors and Space-Time: Volume 2, Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry (with Wolfgang Rindler) (1988)

Concepts