Lionel Penrose

Lionel Sharples Penrose (born June 11, 1898 in London ; † May 12, 1972 ibid) was a British psychiatrist , geneticist , mathematician and chess composer who pioneered the field of hereditary diseases .

Penrose's “Colchester Study”, published in 1938, was the first serious attempt to study the genetic basis of learning disabilities. He found that relatives of patients with severe disabilities were generally unaffected, but some of them were affected with similar severity as the original patient, while relatives of patients with mildly disabilities were more likely to have mild or borderline disabilities.

In British psychiatry , the so-called 'Penrose Act' states that the number of inmates in prisons and psychiatric hospitals are oppositely related, although this is generally viewed as oversimplification.

Penrose developed the Penrose Square Root Law , which can be used in bodies involving different countries. So that every citizen has the same power index , i.e. influence on the decisions of this body, regardless of which country they come from, the power indices of the countries within the body must be distributed proportionally to the square root of the population.

Penrose has composed some chess problems .

Penrose is the father of mathematician Oliver Penrose , researcher Roger Penrose (with whom he made publications on the Penrose triangle ) and chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose . His younger brother was the artist, art historian, and author Roland Penrose .

Web links

• Biography of Renata Laxova, published in Genetics, Vol. 150, 1333-1340, December 1998
• Literature by and about Lionel Penrose in the catalog of the German National Library
• LS Penrose Papers , University College London (UCL)
• Penrose on the Family Tree Wiki
• Compositions by Lionel Penrose on the PDB server