Stephen Hawking (1942 - ), who has been paralysed by Lou Gehrig's disease, is confined to a wheelchair and requires a voice synthesiser to speak.
One of the world's top mathematical physicists, he is best known for his attempts to unite quantum mechanics with relativity,
the two major theories of modern physics and for his contributions to cosmology. In 1979, he was appointed Lucasian Professor of Mathematics
at the University of Cambridge.
