Hawking, the celebrity theoretical physicist

If the name “Stephen Hawking” immediately brings to your mind the image of a spectacled genius seated in his wheelchair, it is only natural. That’s how most of us think of the man who spent the bulk of his lifetime in a wheelchair.

For more than a quarter of his life, however, English theoretical physicist Hawking didn’t require one. That came later.

Born on January 8, 1942 — with the world still embroiled in a war like no other — Hawking was the eldest of four siblings. He grew up in St Albans, England as a normal boy, a teen, and a young man, with nothing extraordinary to mark him out as a wunderkind.