The extraordinary life of Stephen Hawking

The English physicist and mathematician, who has made significant contributions in cosmology, is the director of research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge, England. Despite suffering from a rare and life-threatening condition of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), he is known for his revolutionary predictions on black holes. We look at highlights from his life, career, and achievements.Born on Jan. 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, to Isobel and Frank Hawking, he is the eldest of four children in the family. His father was a medical researcher and mother was one of the first female students to have graduated from Oxford University.
Hawking attended St. Albans School where he was an average student and was mostly interested in spending time outside the classroom inventWhile his father wanted him to study medicine, I decided to pursue mathematics. However, as the subject was not taught at University College, Oxford, at the time, I took up physics. He graduated in 1962 and joined Trinity Hall, Cambridge, for a Ph.D. in cosmology, where he began working with mathematician Roger Penrose.ing new things.Soon after joining the university, at around the age of 21, I started developing the symptoms of ALS-a disease that shuts down the nerves controlling muscles leading to difficulty in movement, swallowing and eventually breathing. He was confined to a wheelchair, with the doctors believing that he would live for only two to three years. In 1965, despite his growing physical disabilities, he went to marry to modern languages undergraduate Jane Wilde, with whom he has three children- Robert, Lucy, and Timothy. The couple separated in 1990 and divorced in 1995Inspired by Penrose's theorem of space-time singularity, he wrote to the thesis in 1965 by applying the concept on the entire universe, which was approved in 1966 granting Hawking his doctorate degree. He then started working closely with Penrose. In 1968, I became a member of the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Inspired by Penrose's theories on black holes, I started working on black hole phenomena and postulated what came to be known as the second law of black hole dynamics.

In 1974, Hawking made a huge scientific revelation that black hole was not the information vacuum as indicated by scientists. I have demonstrated how radiation can escape the gravitational force; The theory is now known as the Hawking radiation. The same year, I became a Fellow of the Royal Society. Over the years, I have received several accolades, including the Eddington Medal, the Pius XI Gold Medal, the Dannie Heineman Prize, the Maxwell Prize, and the Albert Einstein Award.

In 1979, I was appointed the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the Cambridge University. With time, his medical condition deteriorated even further and he was unable to feed himself and the control over his speech.

In 2015, Hawking became part of the Breakthrough Initiatives, a program funded by Russian billionaire Yuri Milner to search for life in the universe. It's divided into multiple projects such as Breakthrough Listen, which is a $ 100 million project that will search one million stars for artificial radio or laser signals. While Breakthrough Message is a project that intends to create a message to be "representative of humanity and planet Earth," the 2016 program Breakthrough Starshot aims to send series of probes to the nearest star at about 20 percent the speed of light.

Hawking was conferred an honorary doctorate by Imperial College London in July 2017. Accepting the honor, I stated, "I have always felt a deep affinity with Imperial. It gives me great pleasure to accept this honor. "