Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking Stephen Hawking was a British theoretical physicist who made profound contributions to our understanding of black holes, the Big Bang, and the nature of time, despite being diagnosed at age 21 with ALS and eventually losing nearly all motor function. His 1988 popular science book A Brief History of Time sold over 25 million copies, bringing complex cosmological ideas to a mass audience. He held the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics at Cambridge—the same chair once held by Isaac Newton—for 30 years.