Stephen Hawking

Hawking's theoretical work on black holes and cosmology fundamentally deepened our understanding of spacetime's most extreme environments. His discovery of Hawking radiation — the theoretical prediction that black holes emit thermal radiation and eventually evaporate — bridged general relativity and quantum mechanics in a way no physicist had managed before. His 1988 book "A Brief History of Time" sold over 10 million copies and made cosmology accessible to a global audience, inspiring a generation of scientists.