Stephen Hawking

Stephen William Hawking was a British theoretical physicist who, along with his fundamental work on black holes and gravitation, made significant contributions to the general understanding of cosmology. He was born on January 8, 1942, in Oxford, England, and died on March 14, 2018, in Cambridge. Hawking received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, and his thesis played an important role in the modern understanding of the Big Bang theory and black holes. In 1974, he proposed the theory that black holes emit so-called "Hawking radiation," which is one of his most famous discoveries.