Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was born January 8, 1942 in Oxford, England, exactly 300 years to the day after Galileo’s death — a coincidence he liked. He went up to University College, Oxford on a scholarship at 17 and to Cambridge for his doctoral work in cosmology. In 1963, at 21, in his first year at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, the British term for ALS. The doctors told him he had about two years.

He did not have two years. He had 55. The disease progressed slowly enough that he was able to complete his PhD, marry Jane Wilde in 1965, raise three children, and produce a body of theoretical physics work that reshaped his field. With Roger Penrose he proved the singularity theorems showing the universe must have begun in a singularity. In 1974 he published the calculation that became known as Hawking radiation — black holes, contrary to what classical relativity predicted, must emit thermal radiation, and over enormous timescales would evaporate. The result married quantum mechanics and general relativity in a way nothing before had, and it remains the most-cited result in his field.

In 1979 he was appointed to the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Isaac Newton. He held it for 30 years. By the late 1980s the disease had taken his ability to write, then his ability to walk, then his ability to speak after a 1985 emergency tracheotomy. He communicated for the rest of his life through a speech-generating device controlled first by hand, later by a single muscle in his cheek — a custom system that limited him to several words per minute. With this constraint he wrote A Brief History of Time (1988), which sold over 25 million copies and stayed on the Sunday Times bestseller list for 237 weeks.

He kept working until the end. He published The Grand Design in 2010, advocated for space exploration and global cooperation in his final years, and made cameos on The Simpsons, Star Trek, and The Big Bang Theory. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2009 and was a Companion of Honour in the UK. He died on March 14, 2018 — Einstein’s birthday, and Pi Day — at age 76. His ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, between the graves of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. The arc was about exactly what it looks like: a young man told he had two years used the next five and a half decades to do work that would have been remarkable from anyone, and historic from someone who could not move.