Stephen Hawking

Hawking's work revolutionised our ideas about how the Universe began

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He was the most recognisable scientist since Albert Einstein, but what made Stephen Hawking such an enduring figure and what did he discover about our Universe?

Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford. Yet it was that other bastion of English academia - Cambridge - where he would make his name. In 1979, he became the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a hallowed post once held by Isaac Newton. Much earlier, in 1966, Hawking completed his PhD thesis at Cambridge titled 'Properties of Expanding Universes'. Newton may have described gravity as an invisible, attractive force between two massive objects, but that idea had been thrown out thanks to Albert Einstein. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, massive objects warp the fabric of the Universe around them and other objects can get caught in this distortion. The apparent attractive force is merely an illusion caused by this.