Stephen William Hawking CH CBE FRS FRSA (

i
/stivn hk/; born 8 January 1942) is an
English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, author and Director of Research at the Centre for
Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge.
[14][15]
Among his significant scientific
works have been a collaboration with Roger Penrose on gravitational singularity theorems in the
framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes emit radiation, often
called Hawking radiation. Hawking was the first to set forth a cosmology explained by a union of
the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He is a vocal supporter of the many-worlds
interpretation of quantum mechanics.
[16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]

Hawking is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a lifetime member of the Pontifical
Academy of Sciences, and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian
award in the United States. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of
Cambridge between 1979 and 2009.
Hawking has achieved success with works of popular science in which he discusses his own
theories and cosmology in general; his A Brief History of Time stayed on the British Sunday
Times best-sellers list for a record-breaking 237 weeks.
Hawking has a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a condition that
has progressed over the years. He is almost entirely paralysed and communicates through a speech
generating device. He married twice and has three children.
Early life and education
Stephen Hawking was born on 8 January 1942
[1]
to Frank and Isobel Hawking.
[26][27]
Despite their
families' financial constraints, both parents attended the University of Oxford, where Frank
studied medicine and Isobel, Philosophy, Politics and Economics.
[27]
The two met shortly after the
beginning of the Second World War at a medical research institute where she was working as a
secretary and he as a medical researcher.
[27][28]
They lived in Highgate, but as London was under
attack in those years, his mother went to Oxford to give birth in greater safety.
[29]
Stephen has two
younger sisters, Philippa and Mary, and an adopted brother, Edward.
[30]
He began his schooling at
the Byron House School; he later blamed its "progressive methods" for his failure to learn to read
while at the school.
[31]

In 1950, when his father became head of the division of parasitology at the National Institute for
Medical Research, Hawking and his family moved to St Albans, Hertfordshire.
[31][32]
The eight-year-
old Hawking attended St Albans High School for Girls for a few months; at that time, younger boys
could attend one of the houses.
[33][34]
In St Albans, the family were considered highly intelligent and
somewhat eccentric;
[31][35]
meals were often spent with each person silently reading a book.
[31]
They
lived a frugal existence in a large, cluttered, and poorly maintained house, and travelled in a
converted London taxicab.
[36][37]
During one of Hawking's father's frequent absences working in
Africa,
[38]
the rest of the family spent four months in Majorca visiting his mother's friend Beryl and her
husband, the poet Robert Graves



Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 June 1, 1968) was an American author, political activist,
and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree.
[1][2]
The story of
how Keller's teacher, Anne Sullivan, broke through the isolation imposed by a near complete lack of
language, allowing the girl to blossom as she learned to communicate, has become widely known
through the dramatic depictions of the play and film The Miracle Worker. Her birthday on June 27 is
commemorated as Helen Keller Day in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania and was authorized at the
federal level by presidential proclamation by President Jimmy Carter in 1980, the 100th anniversary
of her birth.A prolific author, Keller was well-travelled and outspoken in her convictions. A member of
the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, she campaigned for women's
suffrage, labor rights, socialism, and other radical left causes. She was inducted into theAlabama
Women's Hall of Fame in 1971.
[3]

Early childhood and illness
Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her family lived on
a homestead, Ivy Green,
[4]
that Helen's grandfather had built decades earlier.
[5]
She had two younger
siblings, Mildred Campbell and Phillip Brooks Keller, two older half-brothers from her father's prior
marriage, James and William Simpson Keller.
[6]
Her father, Arthur H. Keller,
[7]
spent many years as
an editor for the Tuscumbia North Alabamian, and had served as a captain for the Confederate
Army.
[5]
Her paternal grandmother was the second cousin of Robert E. Lee.
[8]
Her mother, Kate
Adams,
[9]
was the daughter of Charles W. Adams.
[10]
Though originally from Massachusetts, Charles
Adams also fought for the Confederate Army during the American Civil War, earning the rank of
colonel (and acting brigadier-general). Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native
of Switzerland.
[8][11]
One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller
reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating "that there is no king who has not had
a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his."
[8]
Helen Keller was
born with the ability to see and hear. At 19 months old, she contracted an illness described by
doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which might have been scarlet
fever or meningitis. The illness left her both deaf and blind. At that time, she was able to
communicate somewhat with Martha Washington,
[13]
the six-year-old daughter of the family cook,
who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to
communicate with her family.In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles
Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman,Laura
Bridgman, dispatched young Helen, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian
Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice.
[14]
Chisholm referred the
Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them
to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which
was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked 20-year-old former
student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning
of a 49-year-long relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller's governess and eventually
her companion.Anne Sullivan arrived at Keller's house in March 1887, and immediately began to
teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that
she had brought Keller as a present. Keller was frustrated, at first, because she did not understand
that every object had a word uniquely identifying it. In fact, when Sullivan was trying to teach Keller
the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the doll.
[15]
Keller's big breakthrough in
communication came the next month, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the
palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water"; she then
nearly exhausted Sullivan demanding the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.