Stephen Hawking -memorable personality

The most respected and best-known scientists of his age- Stephen Hawking
A man of great humour, he became a popular ambassador for science and was always careful to ensure that the general public had ready access to his work.
Stephen Hawking, physicist who came to symbolize the power of the human mind, dies at 76
Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942. His father, a research biologist, had moved with his mother from London to escape German bombing
Hawking grew up in London and St Albans and, after gaining a first-class degree in physics from Oxford, went on to Cambridge for postgraduate research in cosmology.
As a teenager he had enjoyed horse-riding and rowing but while at Cambridge he was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease which was to leave him almost completely paralysed.
As he was preparing to marry his first wife, Jane, in 1964 his doctors gave him no more than two or three years of life.
But the disease progressed more slowly than expected. The couple had three children, and in 1988 - although Hawking was by now only able to speak with a voice synthesiser following a tracheotomy - he had completed A Brief History of Time - a layman's guide to cosmology.