Sir Roger Penrose: The man who proved black holes weren't 'impossible'

This was the cauldron into which Sir Roger jumped when he started applying some of the principles trained up in topology - a mathematical concept describing the properties of geometric objects as they are twisted or stretched - to black holes. Before his seminal 1965 paper, models could describe how these objects might form but they were often dismissed as being idealised situations with perfect symmetry that would be unlikely to occur in the "real world".