How and why did the universe come into being? What underlying forces shaped the universe as we know it today? These are the questions that have driven Professor Stephen Hawking to excel in his groundbreaking research in the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics. His life's work has transformed much of yesteryear's science fiction into science fact, and presented this information to the general public in a lucid, awe inspiring manner through numerous published works.

Born in England on the 8th January 1942, Stephen Hawking holds the position of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a chair once held by Sir Isaac Newton. He has twelve honorary degrees and has received numerous awards including the prestigious Albert Einstein award. Despite a debilitating illness, his work has earned him a reputation as one of the greatest minds in modern science.

For most of his career, Stephen Hawking has been confined to a wheelchair. At the age of 21, just at the time when he was beginning his research into general relativity and cosmology at Cambridge, he was diagnosed with an incurable motor neurone disease. As he learned to come to terms with his illness, he realized that he had much to achieve in an uncertain time frame. With renewed purpose he continued and progressed in his research, married and started a family, and went on to become a pioneering force in the world of science, defying the unfavourable prognosis of his condition.

Of all Hawking's contributions to science, he is best known for his controversial theories on the nature of black holes. For 30 years his research centred on his theory that a black hole would slowly burn itself out, vanishing from space along with everything that had been pulled into it. This defied one of the most fundamental laws of physics; that information (all the "stuff" that makes up our universe) is never lost. Dubbed "The information paradox", Hawking's theory has been the subject of intense investigation in the scientific world. In 2004 Hawking himself solved this paradox by showing that information, in one form or another, does eventually leak out of a black hole, and so is not lost.

Stephen Hawking's best selling book, "A Brief History of Time", attempts to simplify the physics behind such phenomena as the big bang, four dimensional space/time, relativity, black holes and many other complicated areas of cosmology. Illustrated throughout with mind boggling images, this fascinating book has inspired many a young (and not so young) budding scientist to pursue this particular field of study with enthusiasm and wonder.

Other publications include "Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays", "On the Shoulders of Giants", "The Universe in a Nutshell", and more recently "A Briefer History of Time". This new version of his earlier best seller was written with the intention of further simplifying the original work so that an even greater portion of the population could understand its profound implications and gain a clearer view into the astonishing world of physics and cosmology.

In recent years, Stephen Hawking's illness has progressed to the stage where he is almost totally paralysed. Nevertheless, his research into the origins and workings of the universe continues, slowly, but with the same outstanding ability that has firmly placed him in the highest ranks of the scientific community.

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