Lionel Penrose

Lionel Sharples Penrose ( born June 11, 1898 in London, † May 12, 1972 ) was a British psychiatrist, geneticist, mathematician and chess theorist who pioneered in the field of genetic diseases made ​​.

Penrose in 1938 published " Colchester study" was the first serious attempt to study the genetic basis of learning disability. He found that relatives were not affected in patients with severe disabilities in general, but some of them were affected with similar severity as the original patient, while relatives of patients with mild disability had rather mild or borderline disability.

In British psychiatry called " Penrose - law" indicates that the number of inmates of prisons and mental hospitals are related opposite, although this is generally considered to be an oversimplification.

Penrose developed the square-root law of Penrose, which you can use in forums in which different countries are involved. To every citizen the same power index, ie influence on decisions of this body, has, no matter from which country he comes, the power indices of the countries to be distributed in proportion to the square root of the population within the body.

Penrose is the father of the mathematician Oliver Penrose, Roger Penrose of the researcher (with whom he made ​​publications on the Penrose triangle) and the chess grandmaster Jonathan Penrose.