Stephen William Hawking or commonly known as Stephen Hawking was an English theoretical physicist and cosmologist. At the time of his death he was the director of research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.

His theory of exploding black holes drew upon both relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Hawking studied physics at University College, Oxford for BA degree in 1962 and Trinity Hall, Cambridge for his PhD degree in March 1966 in applied mathematics and theoretical physics, specialising in general relativity and cosmology.

He was born on January 8, 142 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England and died on March 14, 2018 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. He was the eldest of four siblings and grew up in St. Albans. His father, Frank Hawking (1905-1986) was a biologist and his mother, Isobel Eileen Hawking (1915-2013) was a medical research secretary.

He married to Jane Wilde from 1965 to 1995 and Elaine Mason, one of his nurses, from 1995 to 2007. He had three children from the first wife : Robert, Lucy and Timothy. Jane wrote a book during her 30-year marriage life with Stephen Hawking titled : Travelling to Infinity : My Life with Stephen in 2007 and was made into a film : The Thoery of Everything in 2014.

In 1963 Hawking was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a form of motor neurone disease that gradually paralysed him over the decades. This disease usually kills within about four years. He was just 21 years old at the time but managed to survive for 55 years later, the longest recorded time. He died at the age of 76 on March 14, 2018. Stephen hawking had the same IQ as Albert Einstein, 160.

His book “A Brief History of Time” was a bestseller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks on the Sunday Times. His works included collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems and theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation often called Hawking radiation.

A black hole is an area with very strong gravity that nothing – not even light – can escape from it. A place where matter is compressed to an infinite tiny point and all concepts of time and space completely break down. In August 2015, Hawking said that not all information is lost when something enters a black hole and there is a possibility to retrieve the information according to his theory.

Unfortunately, Hawking never won a Nobel Prize. When Roger Penrose won the prize in Physics in 2020, some scientists had opinion that Hawking probably would have shared a Nobel Prize with Penrose had he lived. The academy does not award prizes posthumously.