Stephen Hawking — Theoretical Physicist and Cosmologist

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942, in Oxford, where his parents had traveled from London for his birth to escape wartime bombing. The date coincided with the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's death, a coincidence Hawking himself noted in later life.

Location: Oxford, England

Early in his graduate studies at Cambridge, Hawking's increasing clumsiness and slurred speech led to hospital tests shortly after his twenty-first birthday. Doctors diagnosed an early-onset, slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease (ALS) and gave him roughly two years to live. He continued his studies, later stating the diagnosis gave him a renewed determination to pursue his work.

Location: Cambridge, England

In 1965 Hawking married Jane Wilde, whose support he credited as essential to continuing his career after the diagnosis. The same year, applying Roger Penrose's singularity theorem for collapsing stars to the universe as a whole, he began writing his doctoral thesis arguing that the universe began from a singularity.

Location: Cambridge, England

Hawking's thesis, Properties of Expanding Universes, was approved and he received his PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in March 1966, under advisor Dennis Sciama. His essay Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time shared that year's Adams Prize with Penrose, and he took up a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College.

Location: Cambridge, England

Collaborating with Penrose, Hawking published a proof that any universe obeying general relativity and fitting the standard cosmological models must have begun as a singularity. The Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems provided mathematical support for the Big Bang theory and became foundational to modern cosmology.

Location: Cambridge, England

In a one-and-a-half-page paper in Nature, Hawking showed that quantum effects near a black hole's event horizon cause it to emit thermal radiation, implying black holes can evaporate and eventually explode. The finding united quantum mechanics and general relativity in an unexpected way and stunned the physics community. Later that year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at age 32. The prediction remains unobserved, which is one reason Hawking never received a Nobel Prize.

Location: Cambridge, England

Hawking was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair once held by Isaac Newton, a post he held until 2009. The appointment marked his recognition as one of the world's leading theoretical physicists, and his subsequent work on the no-boundary proposal reimagined the Big Bang as a universe without an edge in time.

Location: Cambridge, England

During a visit to CERN in mid-1985, Hawking contracted life-threatening pneumonia; an emergency tracheotomy saved his life but permanently removed his ability to speak. He communicated thereafter through a speech-generating device, operated first by a handheld switch and eventually by a single cheek muscle, producing the synthesized American-accented voice that became famous worldwide.

Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Published in April 1988, A Brief History of Time explained cosmology, black holes, and the origin of the universe to a general audience. It spent a record 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list, sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and made Hawking a global public figure. He remained ambivalent about the celebrity it brought, noting most buyers never finished the book.

Location: Cambridge, England

On 26 April 2007, Hawking flew aboard a specially modified Boeing 727-200 operated by Zero Gravity Corporation off the Florida coast, experiencing eight parabolic arcs of weightlessness. He had lived with paralysis for over four decades by this point, and described the experience as freeing; he called for humanity's future in space in connection with the flight.

Location: Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States

Hawking died at his home in Cambridge on 14 March 2018, at age 76, having lived more than five decades beyond his original two-year prognosis. His final years included warnings about the risks of artificial intelligence, nuclear war, and climate change for humanity's long-term survival.

Location: Cambridge, England

After a service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey on 15 June 2018, Hawking's ashes were interred in the Abbey's nave between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. During the ceremony, a recording of his synthesized voice was beamed toward the nearest known black hole, 1A 0620-095.

Location: London, England