Sir Roger Penrose is Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. He is the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for Physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their joint contribution to our understanding of the universe. His other books are Spinors and Space Time: Vol 1: Two-Spinor Calculus and Relativistic Fields (CUP, 1987); Vol 2: Spinor and Twistor Methods in Space-Time Geometry (both with Wolfgang Rindler, CUP, 1986), Shadows of the Mind (OUP, 1994), The Nature of Space and Time (with Stephen Hawking, Princeton University Press, 1996), and The Large, the Small and the Human Mind (CUP, 1997).