Early Life & Education

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, in the middle of the Second World War. His parents, Frank and Isobel, lived in London, but with German bombing at its height they had agreed that Oxford, where the two sides observed an unofficial truce on bombing in exchange for sparing Heidelberg, was a safer place for the birth. Hawking enjoyed pointing out that he was born exactly three hundred years after the death of Galileo. He was equally fond of noting that, on the day he was born, around two hundred thousand other babies arrived too, so the coincidence was not as cosmic as it sounded.

An eccentric, bookish family

Both his parents had studied at Oxford, his father medicine, his mother philosophy, politics and economics, at a time when few women did. Frank Hawking became a respected researcher in tropical diseases. The family had a reputation for brilliance and for eccentricity in equal measure: meals taken in silence with everyone reading, a dilapidated old taxi bought cheaply and kept running, a general indifference to appearances and convention.

In 1950 the family moved to St Albans, north of London. The young Hawking was clever but by no means a prodigy in the classroom. He was an unremarkable student in terms of marks, ranked around the middle of his class, but his teachers and friends recognised an unusual mind. His schoolmates nicknamed him "Einstein," partly in irony and partly not. He was fascinated by how things worked, took clocks and radios apart, built model aeroplanes and boats, and with a group of friends even constructed a simple logic computer out of recycled clock parts and switches.

Oxford

Hawking wanted to study mathematics, but his father pushed for medicine, seeing better career prospects. The compromise was University College, Oxford, his father's old college, which did not offer a mathematics degree, so he read physics and chemistry instead, winning a scholarship and going up in 1959 at the age of seventeen.

By his own account, Oxford was a strange interlude. He found the work undemanding, even dull, and the prevailing student culture of effortless cool meant that visible hard work was frowned upon. He later estimated, only half-joking, that he did about a thousand hours of study across his entire three-year degree, roughly an hour a day. For a time he was lonely and bored, until he joined the college boat club as a coxswain, the small crew member who steers and calls the rhythm. It made him popular and gave him a place in college life.

His final examinations produced one of the most-told stories about him. His marks fell on the borderline between a first-class and a second-class degree, which meant an oral examination, a viva, to decide. Asked about his plans, Hawking reportedly told the examiners that if they gave him a first he would go to Cambridge, but if he got a second he would stay at Oxford, and that they should therefore expect him to be much more agreeable to Cambridge. They awarded the first.

Cambridge and the first signs

In 1962 Hawking moved to the University of Cambridge to begin a PhD in cosmology. He had hoped to work under the celebrated astronomer Fred Hoyle, but was instead assigned to Dennis Sciama, a supervisor he came to value enormously and who was at the centre of British cosmology. Cosmology suited him: it was a field where deep questions about the whole universe could be attacked with mathematics, and where, crucially, much of the hardest thinking could be done in the head.

It was around this time, in his last year at Oxford and his first at Cambridge, that something began to go wrong. He grew increasingly clumsy, fell over for no obvious reason, and on a visit home his family noticed his speech was slightly slurred. The investigations that followed would, early in 1963, deliver a diagnosis that should have ended his career before it had truly begun. That story is told in the ALS diagnosis at 21.

He was born three centuries to the day after Galileo died, a link explored in Hawking vs Galileo.