STEPHEN William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. Stephen wanted to do mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he did Physics instead. After three years and not very much work he was awarded a first class honors degree in Natural Science.

　　Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in cosmology, there being no-one working in that area in Oxford at the time. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a research fellow. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and since 1979 has held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas. It was first held by Isaac Barrow, and then in 1663 by Isaac Newton.

　　In 1988 Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, explaining the evolution of his thinking about the cosmos for a general audience. It became a best seller of long standing and established his reputation as an accessible genius. He wrote other popular articles and appeared in movies and television. He remains extremely busy, his work hardly slowed by Lou Gehrig’s disease for which he uses a wheelchair and speaks through a computer and voice synthesizer.

　　His publications include The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, 300 Years of Gravity, Black Holes and Baby Universes.