Soup and wine with Roger Penrose, master of gravity, light and infinity

In an extract from his new book, a colleague recalls a meal with the mathematician who shared the 2020 Nobel prize in physics

I had the pleasure of meeting Roger Penrose, the great mathematician from Oxford, when he was passing through Italy for the Festival of Science in Genoa. Penrose is a polyhedral intellectual. Readers know him for several books, among them the dense and wonderful The Road to Reality, a great panorama of contemporary physics and mathematics, a popular work that is not easy and that shines with intelligence and profundity on every page.

Among his main contributions to our knowledge of the universe are theorems showing that Einstein's theory implies that the universe we see originated from a big bang and black holes form generically. In the field of pure mathematics, he is better known for his study of quasi-periodic" structures, tessellations composed of a few elements that can be repeated to infinity but that, however, are not periodic: they never repeat identically. They are also known as quasi-crystals" and exist in nature, but they have also been used in fields that range from design of floor tiles to a children's game devised by Penrose himself.