Stephen Hawking, CH, CBE
Physicist and Author
A true legend of our time, Stephen Hawking has defied all odds to become probably the greatest theoretical physicist since Albert Einstein. In 1963, at 21, he was diagnosed with ALS, or Motor Neurone Disease, while studying Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, and given two years to live. Nevertheless, since then he has gone on to complete ground-breaking work in physics and cosmology, reconciling general relativity and quantum mechanics. He has published several books, his most notable the international bestseller A Brief History of Time, and was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 until 2009. He still plays an active part in the university’s Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics department and is the founder of the university’s Centre for Theoretical Cosmology. He is a fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science. Hawking’s incredible life has recently been brought to the big screen in 2014’s The Theory of Everything.
