Stephen William Hawking (1942-2018) was a British scientist who is considered to be one of the greatest in the scientific field since Einstein. It is interesting that he was born on the same day as the death anniversary of Galileo Galilei, the Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, on the 8th of January.
Stephen studied cosmology, mathematics and physics at the University College of Oxford. He had a brilliant mind, and he was always very curious and interested in science. He is mostly known for his work with black holes and relativity. He tried to talk about these complex topics in the easiest and simplest way possible by writing a few books about them, making them simpler every time.
His first book was called “A Brief History of Time” which was an informative book on cosmology that offered an overview of space, time, the existence of God and the future. The next one was “The Universe in a Nutshell”, being a simpler version of the previous book. However, this was not it, because he later wrote “A Briefer History of Time”, where he explained everything again and even in simpler terms, trying to make the knowledge accessible to as many people as possible. In total, he wrote 15 books, always bearing in mind the objective of making them easy to understand.
Even though his mind worked beautifully, he had to go through a very devastating illness by which he lost his physical mobility progressively, up to the point of being dependent on a machine in order to communicate and on nurses to do everything else. The name of the illness was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In spite of this tragedy, he did not give up on his life. In fact, the opposite happened: he was even more willing to do research and do something productive with his life. It was after the diagnosis of this illness that he wrote all those books about cosmology and the world.
Bibliography:
https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/h/hawking.htm
https://www.biography.com/scientist/stephen-hawking