Stephen Hawking, who was born on the anniversary of Galileo’s death in 1942, held Isaac Newton’s chair as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge for thirty years. Widely regarded as the most brilliant theoretical physicist since Einstein, he is also the author of Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Universe in a Nutshell, A Briefer History of Time, The Grand Design, and numerous scientific books and papers.
