I [answered about the incompleteness theorem in the other thread](https://mathoverflow.net/a/373565/3948). Let's talk about some of his other contributions here. (This list is definitely incomplete, but just some stuff off the top of my head.) ## 1 The "black hole" theorem (incompleteness theorem) is closely related to, yet subtly different from, the **Hawking-Penrose Singularity Theorems**. The Hawking Penrose theorems again prove the geodesic incompleteness of spacetime under certain cosmologically reasonable assumptions. The difference is in the interpretation. The Penrose theorem proves the genericity of black hole formation; the Hawking-Penrose Theorem guarantees, in some sense, the genericity of the Big Bang. ## 2 Penrose made significant contributions to how we understand **causal geometry of space-times**. A particularly interesting paper is Kronheimer and Penrose, "On the structure of causal spaces" (Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. (1967)). In this paper they abstracted the relation between two space-time events (as being time like or light like) into a partial order. From this one is naturally led to study the ideals and filters, and their principality. This leads to a beautiful description of what the idealized "boundary at infinity" should look like for space-times. ## 3 The **GHP Calculus** (named after the authors Geroch, Held, and Penrose of the 1973 paper "A space-time calculus based on pairs of null directions" (Journal of Mathematical Physics)) is one of the most common ways to perform symbolic computations in GR. The calculus is a version of the Cartan formalism (or a special way of looking at Ricci rotation coefficients), but taking special advantage of the four dimensionality of space-time and the Lorentzian structure of spacetime. ## 4 Finally, something a bit more whimsical, since I don't know anyone who actually uses it: the [Penrose notation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_graphical_notation) for tensor computations. I tried to use it for a few weeks when I was in graduate school, but gave up mostly because they are impossible to type up.