IN MEMORIAM
Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein. In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. Yet he went on to Cambridge to become a brilliant researcher and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. From 1979 to 2009 he held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663.
Professor Hawking had over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Science.
Since 1997, his computer-based communication system, sponsored and provided by Intel Corporation, consisted of a tablet computer mounted on the arm of his wheelchair.
Stephen Hawking was a called a relativistic cosmologist. It means he studied the universe as a whole (cosmologist) and used mainly the theory relativity (relativistic).
Memoir
My Brief History recounts Stephen Hawking’s improbable journey, from his post-war London boyhood to his years of international acclaim and celebrity. Illustrated with rarely seen photographs, this concise, witty and candid account introduces readers to the inquisitive schoolboy whose classmates nicknamed him ‘Einstein’; the jokester who once placed a bet with a colleague over the existence of a black hole; and the young husband and father striving to gain a foothold in the world of academia.
Writing with humility and humour, Hawking opens up about the challenges that confronted him following his diagnosis of ALS aged 21. Tracing his development as a thinker, he explains how the prospect of an early death urged him onward through numerous intellectual breakthroughs, and talks about the genesis of his masterpiece.
