Stephen Hawking.

Stephen William Hawking was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, to Isobel Eileen and Frank Hawking. His father was a research biologist and his mother studied philosophy, politics, and economics. He attended St Albans School from age 11, where he did not excel until he developed an interest in science. He studied physics at University College, Oxford, earning a first-class honours degree in 1962 after putting in minimal effort. He then moved to the University of Cambridge for his PhD in cosmology under Dennis Sciama.

In 1965, Hawking published his PhD thesis on expanding universes. With Roger Penrose in 1970, he proved the singularity theorems of general relativity. Four years later, he proposed Hawking radiation, predicting black holes emit radiation and eventually evaporate. He became Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge in 1979, a post once held by Isaac Newton. His 1988 book A Brief History of Time spent 237 weeks on the Sunday Times bestseller list. On screen, he appeared as himself on Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1993, The Simpsons in 1999, Futurama, and The Big Bang Theory. His voice was used on Pink Floyd’s albums The Division Bell 1994 and The Endless River 2014.

In 1965 Hawking married Jane Wilde; the couple had three children: Robert 1967, Lucy 1970, and Timothy 1979. They divorced in 1995, and later that year he married his former nurse Elaine Mason; that marriage ended in divorce in 2006. Diagnosed with ALS in 1963 at age 21 and given two years to live, he lived until 2018. He retained a sharp sense of humor and a love for popular culture. He described himself as an atheist and was a vocal critic of President Donald Trump.

Hawking’s work advanced theoretical physics, particularly the understanding of black holes and the early universe. His book A Brief History of Time sold millions of copies, making cosmology accessible to a wide audience. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, the Copley Medal in 2006, and the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Companion of Honour. His ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey between Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, with the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy equation as his epitaph. His cameos on The Simpsons and Star Trek, and Eddie Redmayne’s Oscar-winning performance in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, extended his cultural reach.