Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. 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. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science and is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.