Who was Stephen Hawking?
Stephen Hawking was an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist known for his work on black holes and the origins of the universe. His book A Brief History of Time made complex science accessible to millions of readers.
Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo. He studied at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
At 21, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, also called ALS. Doctors gave him only a few years to live, but he lived for more than five decades after the diagnosis.
Black holes
Hawking showed that black holes should emit radiation, now called Hawking radiation. This was a major discovery linking quantum theory and gravity.
He held the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Isaac Newton.
As his illness progressed, he used a wheelchair and communicated through a computer speech system, whose voice became famous.
A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, sold millions of copies. Hawking died on 14 March 2018, and his ashes were placed in Westminster Abbey near Newton and Darwin. The film The Theory of Everything told his story.