In which year was Stephen Hawking born?

Stephen Hawking was born in 1942. His full name was Stephen William Hawking, and he was born on 8 January 1942 in Oxford, England, during the Second World War.

His birth date became symbolically memorable because he was born exactly 300 years after the death of Galileo Galilei. Hawking later became one of the world's best-known theoretical physicists, studying cosmology, black holes and the nature of the universe.

Hawking entered University College, Oxford, in 1959 at age 17 and later completed his doctorate at Cambridge. He held Cambridge's prestigious Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics from 1979 to 2009, a post once held by Isaac Newton.

A common mix-up is confusing his birth year with the year he was diagnosed with motor neuron disease: that diagnosis came in 1963, when he was 21. Hawking died in 2018, aged 76.