Post by Soumya Kanti Roy

He had average grades at school. His passions were cross-country cycling and creating board games. He also loved aeromodelling and the occult. Post A-level he took his admission in Oxford to study Physics. And passed with a First Class in 1962. He moved to Cambridge for his PhD in general relativity and cosmology. While still in his final year at Oxford, he started to feel that he was getting clumsy. He bumped into things, fell down for no reason and slurred in his speech. He was admitted in a hospital for three weeks in early 1963. The prognosis wasn’t good. It was a rare ‘motor-neuron’ disease commonly called Lou Gehrig’s Syndrome. An untreatable disease that degenerated nerve cells and eroded the body. He wasn’t expected to live long enough to complete his PhD. But he had a superhuman will. Powered by his love for Physics and the girl he wanted to marry. Enthused by a Mathematician at King’s College Cambridge, he worked on applying the “space time singularity theory” (used in the studies of black holes) to the universe. He was awarded a PhD on the strength of “this one brilliant stroke of genius”. He married soon after. And put up in a ground floor apartment in the Cambridge campus. He commuted on a wheelchair. The rest is history. Stephen William Hawking