Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking
Born	January 8, 1942 (1942-01-08) Oxford, England
Residence	England
Nationality	British
Fields	Mathematics, Physics
Institutions	University of Cambridge
Alma mater	University of Oxford University of Cambridge
Doctoral advisor	Dennis Sciama
Doctoral students	Bruce Allen Fay Dowker Malcolm Perry Bernard Carr Gary Gibbons
Known for	Black holes Theoretical cosmology Quantum gravity
Notable awards	Prince of Asturias Award (1989) Copley Medal (2006)

Prof. Dr. Stephen Hawking, CH CBE FRS (born 8 January 1942) is an English theoretical physicist and mathematician. He was born in Oxford. In 1950, he moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire. He is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists. A theoretical physicist is someone who uses information from experiments to make predictions about the world. Hawking writes many science books for the public, or the people who are not scientists.

Hawking was a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge (a position that Isaac Newton once had). He retired on 1 October 2009.

He has ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), and because of that he cannot move or talk very well. The illness has worsened over the years and he is now almost completely paralysed. He uses a wheelchair to move, and an Intel computer to talk for him.

Early life and education

Hawking went to St Albans school, a local school in Hertfordshire. At 17 years old, he passed an exam to study at Oxford. He studied physics and chemistry there. Because he found it really easy at the beginning, he didn't study a lot for the final exams. He just managed to get a First, which he needed to do a PhD in Cambridge.

In October 1962 he started his graduate course at Trinity Hall. It was at this time that his illness started to show up. He had difficulties in rowing and then even simply in walking. However, he finished his PhD and wrote about black holes in his thesis. He then got a fellowship (a job as a university teacher) at Gonville and Caius College in 1965.

Selected publications

Technical

• Singularities in Collapsing Stars and Expanding Universes with D. W. Sciama, 1969 Comments on Astrophysics and Space Physics Vol 1 #1
• The Nature of Space and Time with Roger Penrose, foreword by Michael Atiyah, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996, ISBN 0-691-05084-8
• The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime with George Ellis, 1973 ISBN 0-521-09906-4
• The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind, (with Abner Shimony, Nancy Cartwright, and Roger Penrose), Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-521-56330-5 (hardback), ISBN 0-521-65538-2 (paperback), Canto edition: ISBN 0-521-78572-3
• Information Loss in Black Holes, Cambridge University Press, 2005
• God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History, Running Press, 2005 ISBN 0-7624-1922-9

Popular

• A Brief History of Time, (Bantam Press 1988) ISBN 0-553-05340-X
• Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, (Bantam Books 1993) ISBN 0-553-37411-7
• The Universe in a Nutshell, (Bantam Press 2001) ISBN 0-553-80202-X
• On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, (Running Press 2002) ISBN 0-7624-1698-X
• A Briefer History of Time, (Bantam Books 2005) ISBN 0-553-80436-7

Children's books

• George's Secret Key To The Universe, with Lucy Hawking (Simon & Taylor Blevins Publishing 2007)

Notes

General relativity

$G_{\mu \nu} + \Lambda g_{\mu \nu}= {8\pi G\over c^4} T_{\mu \nu}$

Einstein field equations Important concepts Special relativity Equivalence principle World line · Riemannian geometry Phenomena Kepler problem · Lenses · Waves Frame-dragging · Geodetic effect Event horizon · Singularity Black hole Equations Linearized Gravity Post-Newtonian formalism Einstein field equations Friedmann equations ADM formalism BSSN formalism Advanced theories Kaluza–Klein Quantum gravity |Topic5=[[Exact solutions in general relativity|Solutions]] |Items5=[[Schwarzschild metric|Schwarzschild]] <br />[[Reissner-Nordström metric|Reissner-Nordström]]{{·}}[[Gödel metric|Gödel]]<br />[[Kerr metric|Kerr]]{{·}}[[Kerr-Newman metric|Kerr-Newman]]<br />[[Kasner metric|Kasner]]{{·}}[[Taub-NUT vacuum|Taub-NUT]]{{·}}[[Milne model|Milne]]{{·}}[[Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric|Robertson-Walker]]<br />[[pp-wave spacetime|pp-wave]] Scientists Einstein · Minkowski · Eddington Lemaître · Schwarzschild Robertson · Kerr · Friedman Chandrasekhar · Hawking Penrose