Oliver Penrose (born 6 June 1929) is a British theoretical physicist and emeritus professor at Heriot-Watt University."Notes", The rainbow and the worm: the physics of organisms by Mae-Wan Ho, World Scientific, 1998, Pg. 77 His topics of interest include statistical mechanics,"Papers dedicated to Oliver Penrose on the occasion of his 65th birthday", Volume 77, Issues 1–2 of Journal of Statistical Physics phase transitions in metals and the physical chemistry of surfactants. He is known for introducing the concept of off-diagonal long-range order, important to the present understanding of superfluids and superconductors. He is also known for the Penrose criterion in plasma physics.
Penrose 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.
Penrose has worked in fundamental topics, which include understanding the physical basis for the direction of time and interpretations of quantum mechanics."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
Family He is the son of the scientist Lionel Penrose and brother of the mathematical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics Roger Penrose, chess Grandmaster Jonathan Penrose, and geneticist Shirley Hodgson.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,
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External links Penrose's games at Chessgames.com