Stephen Hawking

Born in Oxford in 1942 into a family of physicians, Hawking took a first-class BA in physics at University College, Oxford, in 1959, then moved to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for a PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. At 21, in 1963, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease - a slow-progressing form that paralysed him over decades and eventually left him speaking through a cheek-muscle-driven device. His collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems and his theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation (Hawking radiation) met initial controversy but became a major breakthrough by the late 1970s. He held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge from 1979 to 2009 and was the first to propose a cosmology uniting general relativity and quantum mechanics. His book A Brief History of Time sat on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks. He died in 2018 at 76, more than 50 years past his diagnosis.