gain a Kent county scholarship and a royal scholarship to the Royal College of Science (RCS), a constituent college of Imperial College London. He played centre-forward on the RCS soccer team. He was permitted to skip the first year of the course, and graduated in 1929, obtaining his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics with First Class Honours at age 20. His talent was recognised by the Governor's Prize for Mathematics from the faculty of science. Penney was offered a research position at the London University, where he studied for a doctorate. He spent a term at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he worked with Ralph Kronig. Together, they developed the Kronig–Penney model, which described the motions of electrons in periodic fields. Penney was awarded his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Mathematics in 1931. He accepted a Commonwealth Fund Fellowship and travelled to the United States, where he became foreign research associate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, studying under John H. Van Vleck, and was awarded a Master of Arts degree. While in the United States he visited Carl Anderson's laboratory at the California Institute of Technology and Ernest Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory at the University of California. He was a guest at Robert Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico, saw Babe Ruth play baseball, and was a spectator at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. On returning to England in 1933, Penney was granted the 1851 Exhibition Scholarship to attend Trinity College, Cambridge. He changed his mathematical career to physics, and conducted a thorough research and theoretical investigation into the structure of metals and the magnetic properties of crystals with John Lennard-Jones. In 1935, Penney submitted his final thesis, which contained the fundamental work in the applications of quantum mechanics to the physics of crystals. The University of Cambridge awarded him a PhD in 1935 and a Doctor of Science in Mathematical Physics in 1936. In 1936, he was elected to the Stokes studentship at Pembroke College, Cambridge, but in the same year he returned to London and was appointed Reader in Mathematics at Imperial College London, a post he held from 1936 to 1945. On 27 July 1935, Penney married Adele Minnie Elms, a university student from Kent he had known since his days in Sheerness. They had two sons, Martin, who was born in 1938, and Christopher, who was born in 1941. Second World War Physex Penney