Stephen Hawking

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A FEW FACTS ABOUT THE GREAT MAN...
BIRTH: 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England.

SCHOOL:. At eleven Stephen went to St Albans School, where he eventually took the Oxford Entrance Examination a year early.

UNIVERSITY:University College, Oxford, his father's old college. Stephen wanted to do Mathematics,but Mathematics was not available at University College, so he studied Physics instead. After three years and approximately a thousand hours work he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.

RESEARCH:Stephen went to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, His supervisor was Denis Sciama. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow, and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College.
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. This was  held by  in 1663 by Isaac Newton.
:Stephen Hawking has given much thought to the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory,
One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.

WORKS: The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with G F R Ellis, General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey, with W Israel, and 300 Years of Gravity, with W Israel.
Stephen Hawking has two popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, and his later book, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays.

HONOURS:Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees, was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
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