Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Stephen Hawking passed away earlier this morning in Cambridge, England. As a brilliant theoretical physicist and best-selling author all while dealing with a debilitating disease, Hawking rose to be the best-known scientist of his time. 

I'll leave it to the physics blogs to talk about his research. Hawking inspired me through his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time. Hawking told Time magazine before the magazine's publication "Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did put in Einstein’s famous equation E = mc². I hope that this will not scare off half my potential readers.”

So you read the book and he manages to describe his highly mathematical-based view of the universe without resorting to mathematics, by far the best written popular science book I have read.

A Brief History of Time came out when I was in grad school so it didn't play a role in me becoming an academic but it did make me realize that science has a story to tell. From the preface of my own book.

I took inspiration from Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, which explains physics not through formulas and technicalities but with examples and stories. I attempt to do the same here to explore the spirit and importance of the P versus NP problem.

I am under no illusion that I came even close to Hawking's level of exposition.

A poll taken last year showed most Americans could not name a single living scientist but among the 19% that could, the scientist they named most often was Stephen Hawking. We lost not only a brilliant physicist but one of the great symbols for science of our generation.