Remembering Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking was the British cosmologist and theoretical physicist, who was probably the best-known scientist in the world at the time of his death. His groundbreaking work in time and space, black holes, and the nature of the universe are perhaps the greatest scientific discoveries in the area since those of Einstein. His book, A Brief History of Time (1988), was a worldwide bestseller and was translated into at least 35 languages. Hawking was also familiar to the public because he spent the last fifty years of his life in a wheelchair as a result of a debilitating motor neuron disease. Despite this, he was a celebrity throughout the lay and scientific worlds.