Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) was a British theoretical physicist, cosmologist and author, and one of the most recognisable scientists of the modern era. His pioneering work on black holes, gravitational singularities and the theory that black holes emit radiation — now known as Hawking radiation — transformed our understanding of the universe, and he held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge, the chair once occupied by Isaac Newton, for nearly three decades.

Diagnosed with ALS at twenty-one, Hawking defied a prognosis of a few years to teach, think and write for half a century, at last communicating through a famous speech-generating device. His book A Brief History of Time (1988) became one of the bestselling popular-science works ever published, carrying ideas about the Big Bang, quantum gravity and the fate of the cosmos to hundreds of millions of readers. Remembered as one of the greatest minds of his time, he remained a champion of scientific curiosity — and of the mind's refusal to be limited.