History of Stephen Hawking

Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford.

In 1950, when Hawking's father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for Medical Research, the family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire.

Hawking began his university education at University College, Oxford, in October 1959 at the age of 17.

The MND diagnosis came when Hawking was 21, in 1963. At the time, doctors gave him a life expectancy of two years.

When Hawking was a graduate student at Cambridge, his relationship with Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister whom he had met shortly before his late 1963 diagnosis with motor neurone disease, continued to develop. The couple became engaged in October 1964 – Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for" – and the two were married on 14 July 1965.

Hawking returned to Cambridge in 1975 to a more academically senior post, as reader in gravitational physics.

In 1979, Hawking was elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge.

Publishes "A Brief History of Time," a book on cosmology aimed at the general public that becomes an instant bestseller.

On 20 July 2015, Hawking helped launch Breakthrough Initiatives, an effort to search for extraterrestrial life. Hawking created Stephen Hawking: Expedition New Earth, a documentary on space colonisation, as a 2017 episode of Tomorrow's World.

In August 2015, Hawking said that not all information is lost when something enters a black hole and there might be a possibility to retrieve information from a black hole according to his theory.

Hawking died at his home in Cambridge, England, on 14 March 2018, at the age of 76.