Lucas News

The wheelchair-bound Hawking, director of research at the Institute for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 but went on to become Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a chair he held for 30 years that was once occupied by Isaac Newton .

8, 1942, 300 years to the day of Galileo's death, in Oxford, England. He is the eldest of three children.