Current Science

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Stephen Hawking, born 8 January 1942, at Oxford in an academic family, had an early aptitude and inclination towards science. He studied physics and chemistry at university in Oxford, though he seems not to have excelled as a student, instead spending much of his time at the college boat club! He went to Cambridge for his Ph D hoping to study cosmology with Fred Hoyle, but instead was assigned to Dennis Sciama who proved to be an important influence on him. It was at this time that Hawking was diagnosed with ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease – a degenerative motor neuronal disorder. Though he was given only a couple of years to live at age 22 or so, his disease progressed slower than predicted.
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