Stephen Hawking

Of the important physicists in history, Stephen Hawking is among the most important alive. For thirty years Hawking taught mathematics and physics at Cambridge, holding the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, which he shares with Isaac Newton. Hawking also has ALS, or a type of Lou Gehrig's disease, that progresses particularly slowly and has allowed him to live for decades despite being largely immobile and unable to speak.

Hawking's accomplishments in theoretical physics are quite important. Much of Hawking's work has concerned black holes, interstellar phenomena produced by incredible concentrations of gravity so powerful that they prevent light from escaping their event horizons. It is often thought that the center of a black hole contains a singularity, an infinitely dense and infinitely small concentration of matter and energy. Hawking is the world's foremost singularity theorist.

Hawking has also helped lay the foundation for the theory of quantum...