Roger was a good boy!

It's amazing how fame can be clutched in any way possible and my hometown of London, Ontario is no exception. 

Roger Penrose just got a Nobel Prize for his work with black holes so naturally people here were anxious to tell everyone about the time he lived here! (The thing is he was only here for a few years while he was in primary school.)

Part of Roger Penrose’s Nobel Prize win can be traced to his childhood days growing up on Wellington Street in London.

Penrose, 89, a professor at Oxford University, and two other researchers were announced Tuesday as winners of the 2020 Nobel Prize in physics for their discoveries about black holes.

But as a boy in the 1940s, Penrose challenged his principal at Ryerson elementary school to games of chess at recess, said Nancy Poole, who went to school with his brother Oliver.

The British mathematician has a short, but memorable connection to the Forest City where he lived for at least three years in the early 1940s when his father worked at the London psychiatric hospital, then known as the London asylum, and was an adviser to the provincial government.