Stephen Hawking was born and brought up in London. He wanted to specialise in maths in his last couple of years at school where his maths teacher had inspired him to study the subject. However Hawking's father was strongly against the idea and Hawking was persuaded to make chemistry his main school subject.

After attending Oxford University Hawking moved to Cambridge to take up research in general relativity and cosmology, a difficult area for someone with only a little mathematical background.

In early 1963 motor neurone disease was diagnosed. His condition deteriorated quickly and the doctors predicted that he would not live for much longer.

In 1982 Hawking decided to write a popular book on cosmology called 'A Brief History of Time' which was published in 1988. The book broke sales records, by May 1995 it had been in The Sunday Times best-sellers list for 237 weeks breaking the previous record of 184 weeks.