He also got it together when it counted, dominating his Oxford entrance exams to score a scholarship to study physics at age 17. Of course, there was a reason those same classmates nicknamed him 'Einstein' Hawking built a computer with friends as a teenager and demonstrated a tremendous capacity for grasping issues of space and time. He claimed he didn't learn to properly read until he was 8 years old, and his grades never surpassed the average scores of his classmates at St. Hawking didn’t have the sort of sparkling early academic career you'd expect from a Grade-A genius. In honor of his inspiring endurance, and his immense contributions to the understanding of the cosmos that swirls around us, here are seven facts about the life of this otherworldly scientist: He was an average student in elementary school all while his body deteriorated from a crippling disease that was supposed to have killed him by the mid-1960s.
Thanks to his groundbreaking work with black holes and relativity, he went on to hold distinguished academic posts, be appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire and earn the U.S. Few people emerge from the fields of cosmology and theoretical physics with the sort of name recognition equal to that of a celebrity athlete or actor, but that's exactly what happened with Stephen Hawking.
