“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist. Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don’t just give up.” 

- Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was born January 8, 1942, on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death. At the age of 22 Prof Hawking was given only a few years to live after being diagnosed with a rare form of motor neurone disease. The British scientist was famed for his work with black holes and relativity. He was the first to set out a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics. He wrote several popular science books including A Brief History of Time. He also discovered that black holes leak energy and fade to nothing - a phenomenon that would later become known as Hawking radiation. e died today, March 14th, on the anniversary of Einstein's birth. 

Through his work with mathematician Sir Roger Penrose he demonstrated that Einstein's general theory of relativity implies space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

The scientist gained popularity outside the academic world and appeared in several TV shows including The Simpsons, Red Dwarf and The Big Bang Theory.