LONDON 15 March 2018: Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking died early Wednesday at the age of 76, his family said in a statement, adding that the professor died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Cambridge.
In 2017, Hawking, who at 21 was diagnosed with incurable motor neurone disease which left him in a wheelchair and needing to use a computer voice to communicate, told the BBC he never expected to reach 75, , Wam said quoting Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA).
Hawking achieved worldwide fame after his book ‘A Brief History of Time’ was published in 1988, selling more than 10 million copies.
Born into an intellectual family on 8th January, 1942, Hawking won a scholarship to Oxford University in 1959, and three years later switched to rival Cambridge to conduct research on cosmology.
At the unusually young age of 32, Hawking was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, Britain’s most prestigious academic institution. In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University – the same post once held by Isaac Newton.
He became one of the world’s greatest experts on gravity and black holes – places where matter is compressed to the point where the normal laws of space and time break down, DPA added.