Skip to main content
October 1, 2020 outreach

Roger Penrose was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Roger has been a visiting member of IGC since it was founded and also serves on its External Scientific Advisory Board. From 1993 to 2012, he also held the Francis R. and Helen M. Pentz Visiting Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Penn State. Through regular visits during the first 15 years of this period, he enriched our intellectual lives tremendously through countless discussions (that often ran late into dinner times(!)), seminars and popular lectures.

Links

Full article

About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.