Page 36 - Great Elizabethans

The maths and physics mastermind Stephen Hawking was told, as a young man, that a disease called ALS would hold him back and shorten his life. Instead, Stephen went on studying and asking BIG questions about the universe for more than 50 years!
BORN FOR THE STARS
In the bitter cold of a wartime Oxford winter, on 8th January 1942, a boy called Stephen William Hawking was born, exactly 300 years after the death of the great astronomer Galileo Galilei. His mother, Isobel, had gone to Oxford to have her baby because Germany had promised not to bomb the ancient city, so it was much safer there than in heavily bombed London. A few days before Stephen was born, she bought an atlas of the stars – as if she already knew her baby would grow up to study them.
Stephen’s parents were intelligent and well-educated – Isobel had studied at Oxford University, and his father, Frank, was a medical researcher. They had some unusual habits,
including driving around in an old taxi! Sometimes young Stephen, his parents and his sisters, Philippa and Mary, would all bring their own books to the dinner table, and everyone would eat and read in total silence.
Stephen enjoyed taking things apart – although they didn’t always go back together again! As a teenager, he built a computer out of clock parts and bits of rubbish with a group of friends.
At school in London, Stephen was quickly nicknamed ‘Einstein’, although he didn’t stand out as a student at first – he was clever, but struggled to
focus on lessons and tests in class (and his handwriting was terrible!). But, encouraged by his teacher, he developed a particular interest in maths and he liked to lie outside and look at the stars.
His father thought Stephen should study medicine, so that he could earn more money, but Stephen was drawn to mathematics and physics
– he hoped they would allow him to understand more about the laws of the universe. When he was 17, he won a scholarship to study physics and
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chemistry at Oxford University.