Caption: Sir Roger Penrose (1931--) at the Festival della Scienza, Genoa, Italy, 2011.

Features:

1. Roger Penrose has done many, many things, but he is particularly famous for having shown that there are physical pathways starting from actual physical objects in physical reality for black holes to come into existence according to general relativity, and so black holes are NOT just solutions allowed by general relativity in physical reality:
   The importance of Penrose's epoch-making paper "Gravitational Collapse and Space-Time Singularities" (1965) was not its only result, summarised roughly as that if an object such as a dying star implodes beyond a certain point, then nothing can prevent the gravitational field getting so strong as to form some kind of gravitational singularity. It also showed a way to obtain similarly general conclusions in other contexts, notably that of the cosmological Big Bang ... (Slightly edited.)
   ---Wikipedia: Roger Penrose: Research.

   Note:
   1. The fact that stars and other objects can collapse to gravitational singularities shows an event horizon forms in such collapses. Recall the event horizon is really the defining characteristic of a black holes: the surface from below which nothing can get out: i.e., the point of NO return.

   2. Of course, Penrose's proof assumes general relativity, and so general relativity must be true for his proof to be true. However, general relativity is our best theory of gravity and there is lots of evidence now that black holes exist. See IAL 25: Black Holes: Do Black Holes Exist?.

   3. Actually, the gravitational singularity at the center of black holes is probably NOT a point or ring of infinite density as predicted by strict general relativity. It is believed that quantum gravity must prevent collapse to infinite density. The real counterpart to the gravitational singularity must be some exotic quantum mechanical state, but since we have NO established quantum gravity theory, we do NOT know what that state is.

      However, Penrose's is still valid for showing that the event horizon exists.????

      For more on the gravitational singularity, see IAL 25: Black Holes: Schwarzschild Black Holes: The Singularity.

2. Penrose's research particularly on black holes led to him receiving the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics shared with Andrea Ghez (1965--) and Reinhard Genzel (1952--) for their investigations of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (AKA Galactic center black hole) at the center of the Milky Way (i.e., at the Galactic center). Sagittarius A* has mass 4.100(34)*10**6 M_☉.

3. Penrose also made investigations of Penrose tiling (a form of aperiodic tiling), an advance in artistic design.

4. Penrose has written several books (see Wikipedia: Roger Penrose: Works) including The Road to Reality (2004) which is over 1100 pages (counting blank end pages) and is a popular book---but maybe only for physicists. Yours truly has read it---fortunately, Sir Roger gave these sage words "read it as poetry". Actually, yours truly can't find where he said that---so maybe it's a figment of the imagination.

5. Fanfare for Roger Penrose: Trumpet Sonata in D Major, Z. 850: I. (Allegro) | 1:16.