Stephen William Hawking

 Born in Oxford on January 8 1942 - 300 years after the death of astronomer Galileo Galilei - Professor Hawking grew up in St Albans, Hertfordshire. After being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) - at the age of 22, Hawking was given just a few years to live.

 Hawking is as much a celebrity as he is a scientist, having appeared on The Simpsons, Star Trek and having provided narration for a British Telecom commercial that was later sampled on a Pink Floyd album.

  He had a difficult time at the local public school and was persecuted as a "swot" who was more interested in jazz, classical music and debating than sport and pop. Although not top of the class, he was good at maths and "chaotically enthusiastic in chemistry". Hawking has said of his workload as an undergraduate at Oxford "amounted to an average of just an hour a day". He also said: "I'm not proud of this lack of work, I'm just describing my attitude at the time, which I shared with most of my fellow students. You were supposed to be brilliant without effort, or to accept your limitations and get a fourth class degree."Despite his workload confession, Hawking got a first and went to Cambridge to begin work on his PhD - but he was already beginning to experience the first symptoms of his illness, having fallen over twice for no reason during the last year of his undergraduate degree.

 Hawking has credited his marriage in 1965 to Jane Wilde, a language student, as a turning point in his life at a time when he was unsure as to what the point of a degree was if he was to die soon. They went on to have three children - Robert, Lucy, and Timothy.


 At a meeting of the Royal Society meeting, Hawking interrupted a lecture by renowned astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle to let him know that he had made a mistake. When asked how he knew there had been an error, Hawking replied: "Because I've worked them out in my head."

 During the 1970s Hawking produced a stream of first class research, including probably his most important contribution to cosmology: the discovery of Hawking radiation, which allows a black hole to leak energy and gradually fade away to nothing.

 In the 1980s, Professor Hawking and Professor Jim Hartle proposed a model of the universe which had no boundaries in space or time. The concept was described in A Brief History Of Time, which sold 25 million copies worldwide.

 In February 1990 he left his wife of twenty five years to set up home with one of his nurses, Elaine Mason. The couple married in September 1995 but divorced in 2006.


Among some of his more unconventional theories, Professor Hawking has predicted the end of humanity - due to global warming, a new killer virus, or the impact of a large comet.

 In 2009 he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for 30 years, taking up the post in 1979 and retiring on 1 October 2009. He is also a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge having held many other academic positions. In recent years, Professor Hawking has examined the relationship between science and religion, writing a 2010 book Grand Design, which argues that evoking God is not necessary to explain the origins of the universe.


Stephen Hawking is the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. Now Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.

In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. Yet he went on to Cambridge to become a brilliant researcher and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. Since 1979 he has held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. Professor Hawking has over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science. Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.

University studies:

Hawking went up to Oxford in October 1959 at the age of 17.For the first 18 months he was bored and lonely: he was younger than many other students, and found the academic work "ridiculously easy".His physics tutor Robert Berman later said, "It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it."A change occurred during his second and third year when, according to Berman, Hawking made more effort "to be one of the boys". He developed into a popular, lively and witty college member, interested in classical music and science fiction.Part of the transformation resulted from his decision to join the college Boat Club, where he coxed a rowing team.The rowing trainer at the time noted that Hawking cultivated a daredevil image, steering his crew on risky courses that led to damaged boats.


Hawking has estimated that he studied about 1000 hours during his three years at Oxford. These unimpressive study habits made sitting his Finals a challenge, and he decided to answer only theoretical physics questions rather than those requiring factual knowledge. A first-class honours degree was a condition of acceptance for his planned graduate study in cosmology at the University of
Cambridge.Anxious, he slept poorly the night before the examinations and the final result was on the borderline between first and second class honours, making a viva necessary.Hawking was concerned that he was viewed as a lazy and difficult student, so when asked at the oral examination to describe his future plans said, "If you award me a First, I will go to Cambridge. If I receive a Second, I shall stay in Oxford, so I expect you will give me a First."
He was held in higher regard than he believed: as Berman commented, the examiners "were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far cleverer than most of themselves". After receiving a first-class BA (Hons.) degree, and following a trip to Iran with a friend, he began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in October 1962.

Hawking's first year as a doctoral student was a difficult one. He was initially disappointed to find that he had been assigned Dennis William Sciama as a supervisor rather than Fred Hoyle and he found his training in mathematics inadequate for work in general relativity and cosmology.He also struggled with his health. Hawking had experienced increasing clumsiness during his final year at Oxford, including a fall on some stairs and difficulties when rowing.The problems worsened, and his speech became slightly slurred; his family noticed the changes when he returned home for Christmas and medical investigations were begun.The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when Hawking was 21. At the time doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years.After his diagnosis, Hawking fell into a depression; though his doctors advised that he continue with his studies, he felt there was little point.At the same time, however, his relationship with Jane Wilde, friend of his sister, and whom he had met shortly before his diagnosis, continued to develop. The couple were engaged in October 1964.Hawking later said that the engagement "gave him something to live for."Despite the disease's progression—Hawking had difficulty walking without support, and his speech was almost unintelligible—he now returned to his work with enthusiasm.Hawking started developing a reputation for brilliance and brashness when he publicly challenged the work of Fred Hoyle and his student Jayant Narlikar at a lecture in June 1964.When Hawking began his graduate studies, there was much debate in the physics community about the prevailing theories of the creation of the universe: the Big Bang and the Steady State theories.Inspired by Roger Penrose's theorem of a spacetime singularity in the centre of black holes, Hawking applied the same thinking to the entire universe, and during 1965 wrote up his thesis on this topic.There were other positive developments: Hawking received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College, and he and Jane were married on July 14, 1965.He completed his doctorate in March 1966,and his essay entitled "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time" shared top honours with one by Penrose to win that year's Adams Prize.