Stephen Hawking

📍Oxford, Oxfordshire, United Kingdom

“I was born in Oxford on the 8th of January 1942 — three hundred years to the day after the death of Galileo, which I was always pleased by — and I grew up in a family of unconventional intellectuals: my father was a tropical medicine researcher, my mother had studied at Oxford, and our house in St Albans was chaotic and bookish and alive with ideas. I was not a particularly diligent student at school, though I was clearly intelligent, and it was only at Oxford reading physics that I began to understand what I was capable of. The diagnosis of motor neurone disease came when I was twenty-one and the doctors gave me two years to live. I lived for another fifty-five. The Oxford of my childhood was the Oxford of narrow streets and bicycle bells and the smell of old books, and it shaped in me the love of ideas for their own sake that sustained me through everything that followed.”

Sources: Hawking, S. A Brief History of Time (1988), Bantam Books; Ferguson, K. Stephen Hawking: His Life and Work (2011), Bantam Press; White, M. & Gribbin, J. Stephen Hawking: A Life in Science (1992), Viking