The physics prize Stephen Hawking shared with Roger Penrose in 1988 was the Wolf Prize in Physics. The Wolf Foundation awarded it for their contributions to general relativity, especially their work showing the importance of cosmological singularities and black holes.
Their collaboration built on different but complementary insights. Penrose developed a powerful theorem about gravitational collapse and black-hole formation, while Hawking applied related mathematical techniques to the origin and evolution of the universe. Together, their work demonstrated that singularities arise under broad physical conditions rather than only in highly artificial models.
The Wolf Prize is an international award established by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. Hawking and Penrose were joint recipients in 1988, and the citation praised how their work deepened understanding of the universe’s possible origin and fate. The award is sometimes confused with the Nobel Prize, but Hawking never received a Nobel Prize. Penrose later shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery that black-hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity.