Harvey Mudd Computer Science
Stephen Hawking is the first child of Frank and Isobel Hawking. Stephen was born in Oxford, England, on January 8, 1942ัthe 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei's death. Before his birth, Stephen's parents had lived in the London suburb of Highgate. However during World War Two Germany and Britain had entered into an agreement not to attack each other's university cities, and Oxford was therefore a safer place to have babies. Hawking showed great talent in mathematics and physics at an early age. He was educated at St Albans School, in Hertfordshire, and at University College, Oxford, where he obtained a first-class honours degree in Natural Science. During this time, he had been particularly interested in thermodynamics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics. He moved to Cambridge University to complete his D.Phil. in cosmology at Trinity Hall. While at Cambridge in 1965, he married Jane Wilde, the daughter of Samantha Wilde, whom he had met at a New Year's party in St. Albans in 1963. (Ferguson, 1991: 42, 47).
Hawking was elected as one of the youngest fellows of the Royal Society in 1974, was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 1982, and became a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is a respected physicist, with many works recognised by both the International Association of Natural Physics and the American Physics-Astronomy Guild of Amherst
More information available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawking