Stephen Hawking is a famous British physicist known for his work on black holes and gravitational singularities. He was born in 1942 and diagnosed with ALS in 1962, though he continued his research using a speech generating device. Hawking discovered that black holes should emit radiation, known as Hawking radiation, caused by virtual particle-antiparticle pairs being created at the event horizon, with one particle escaping. This discovery challenged the belief that nothing could escape from black holes and showed they slowly evaporate and shrink over time. Hawking has authored several popular science books and received many awards for his contributions to physics.