Stephen Hawking was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.
He was elected at age 32, an unusually early recognition of a physicist whose most important work concerned general relativity, cosmology, and black holes. The Royal Society’s citation highlighted his contributions to singularity theorems, gravitational theory, and the mathematical description of the universe.
Hawking’s election came more than a decade after he began his research career in Cambridge and shortly after the publication of influential work on black-hole mechanics. His research helped establish that realistic models of the universe can contain singularities and that black holes obey precise mathematical laws.
Being elected a Fellow is distinct from receiving a Royal Society medal. Hawking later received the Hughes Medal in 1976 and the Copley Medal in 2006. The year 1974 is therefore specifically associated with his Fellowship election, not with one of those later honours. He remained a Fellow until his death in 2018.