Stephen Hawking Facts
Stephen Hawking Facts
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| Interesting Stephen Hawking Facts: |
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| Stephen Hawking was born in Oxford, England to parents who were graduates of the University of Oxford. |
| In 1950 the family moved to Hertfordshire where his father was head of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical research. |
| While there Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls, later transferring to St Albans School. |
| In October 1959 he entered University College on a scholarship and began the study of physics and chemistry. |
| He became a popular student and coxed the rowing team. |
| He received a B.A with honors in 1962 and began his graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in October of that year. |
| Hawking had had some falls at Oxford his senior year. |
| In 1963 he was diagnosed with a rare form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis that is characterized by an early-onset but slow progression. |
| He was fiercely determined to be independent and it wasn't until the late 1960s that he consented to use a wheelchair. |
| In 1966 he earned his PhD in cosmology with a thesis on singularities and black holes. |
| His co-authored a paper with Roger Penrose titled, "Singularities and the Geometry of Space-Time," which earned that year's Adams Prize. |
| He received a research fellowship at Gonville and Caius College. |
| In 1968 Hawking and Penrose published an essay on their theory that the universe might have started as a singularity. |
| Their essay was the runner-up in the Gravity Research Foundation competition. |
| In 1970 Hawking and Penrose published a proof that the universe started as a singularity using the general theory of relativity. |
| In 1970 Hawking's assertion that the event horizon of a black hole can never get smaller became known as the second law of black hole dynamics. |
| In 1970 he became the Sherman Fairchild distinguished visiting professor at Caltech and continues to work there a month a year. |
| In 1973 Hawking's first book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time was published. |
| In 1974 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. |
| By the end of the 1970s his speech had deteriorated until only a few close friends and family members could understand him so he used a translator to communicate with others. |
| He became an advocate for those with disabilities and urged Cambridge to improve access and build adapted student housing. |
| From 1970 to 2009 he was the Lucasian Professor Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. |
| In 1985 he contracted pneumonia during a visit to the European Organization for Nuclear Research and the tracheotomy he had to have to breathe removed the last of his speaking ability. |
| He communicates with a computer that allows him to select from a list of scanned words. |
| In 2005 the device was further adapted to allow him to control it with his cheek muscles since he no longer had control of his hand. |
| In 1988 he published A Brief History of Time to make cosmology more accessible to the average reader and it quickly became an international best seller. |
| In 1993 he published a collection of essays entitled Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. |
| In 2007 he and his daughter, Lucy, collaborated on a children's book titled, George's Secret Key to the Universe. |
| He is currently the director of research at the Cambridge University Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. |
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