Stephen Hawking
1942–2018 1 entry
Biography
Stephen Hawking was an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist, known for his work on black holes and the origin of the universe. He was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, three hundred years to the day after the death of Galileo, and studied at Oxford and Cambridge. At twenty-one he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease and given two years to live; he lived another fifty-five, gradually losing the use of almost every muscle and, in the end, speaking through a computer with a synthetic voice.
With Roger Penrose he showed that the universe must have begun in a singularity, and in 1974 he found that black holes are not entirely black but give off radiation, which now bears his name. From 1979 to 2009 he held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair once held by Isaac Newton. His book A Brief History of Time, published in 1988, sold millions of copies and made him the most famous scientist of his day. He died in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, and his ashes were laid in Westminster Abbey, between Newton and Darwin.
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