A genius who never lett

Looking at Professor Stephen Hawking, his small body slumped and immovable in a wheelchair like a puppet with no strings, it was sometimes hard to imagine the lively and phenomenal mind that dwelled within.

Struck down at the age of 21 with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the most common form of motor neuron disease, and given only two years to live by his doctors at the time of his diagnosis, Hawking became one of the world’s longest surviving sufferers of the muscle-wasting disease.

Hawking, born into an intellectual family on January 8, 1942, always knew that he wanted to be a scientist.

“I have a simple aim. I want to find out where the universe comes from, how and why it began and how it will end,” he said.

He had never been very well co-ordinated physically as a child: “I was not good at ball games, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers.” His classmates nicknamed him “Einstein” nonetheless.

In 1959, he won a scholarship to Oxford University, and three years later switched to rival Cambridge to conduct research on cosmology — it was just after his move there that he was diagnosed.

While it came as a “bit of a shock” to him, he had tried never to feel sorry for himself by remembering a young boy in the hospital bed opposite him