Professor Stephen Hawking to deliver 50th Anniversary lecture at University of Leicester.

The University of Leicester will be making history on Wednesday 28th May when one of the best-known and most remarkable scientists of our time will talk on the beginning of time and the cosmos.

As part of the University’s 50th Anniversary celebrations, Professor Stephen Hawking, CBE, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, will discuss theories on the origin of the Universe in a public lecture. Among the general public Stephen Hawking is famed for his best-selling ‘A Brief History of Time’ and, more recently, ‘Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays’ and ‘A Briefer History of Time’.

This free event has proved extremely popular and is already full with a long waiting list – in fact, all spaces in the University’s largest, 500-seater, public lecture theatre were filled within days of the lecture being advertised.

Professor Rob Hillman, Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Leicester, commented: "This is a fantastic opportunity to engage with a truly unique scientist whose work has gained the admiration of both the scientific community and the general public."

Professor Robert Burgess, Vice-Chancellor, added: “We are delighted that this special lecture in our 500-seater lecture theatre within the new David Wilson Library complex is being given by such an eminent figure as Stephen Hawking. This, alongside many other events, will contribute to making our 50th Anniversary year highly memorable.”

Stephen Hawking studied Physics at University College, Oxford, where he was awarded a first-class honours degree in Natural Science. Towards the end of his undergraduate years he began to notice the signs that were finally diagnosed as motor neurone disease in his 21st year, when he was studying for a PhD in Cosmology at Cambridge.

He became first a Research Fellow and later a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. In 1973 he left the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy for the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, where, since 1979, he has been Lucasian Professor of Mathematics – a post formerly held (in 1663) by Isaac Newton.

Stephen Hawking’s research has been on the basic laws governing the Universe, including the Big Bang, black holes and unifying Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with Quantum Theory.

His publications for the scientific community include ‘The Large Scale Structure of Spacetime’ (with G F R Ellis); ‘General Relativity: An Einstein Centenary Survey’ (with W Israel); and ‘300 Years of Gravity’ (with W Israel).

For this work, he has received many awards and honours, including the CBE in 1982 and the Companion of Honour in 1989. He is also a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Science.