Stephen William Hawking was born on 8 January 1942 (300 years after the death of Galileo) in Oxford, England. His parents' house was in north London, but during the second world war, Oxford was considered a safer place to have babies. When he was eight, his family moved to St. Albans, a town about 20 miles north of London. At the age of eleven, Stephen went to St. Albans School and then on to University College, Oxford; his father's old college. Stephen wanted to study Mathematics, although his father would have preferred medicine. Mathematics was not available at University College, so he pursued Physics instead. After three years and not very much work, he was awarded a first class honours degree in Natural Science.

Stephen then went on to Cambridge to do research in Cosmology, there being no one working in that area in Oxford at the time. His supervisor was Denis Sciama, although he had hoped to get Fred Hoyle who was working in Cambridge. After gaining his Ph.D. he became first a Research Fellow and later on a Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. After leaving the Institute of Astronomy in 1973, Stephen came to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics in 1979, and held the post of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics from 1979 until 2009. The chair was founded in 1663 with money left in the will of the Reverend Henry Lucas who had been the Member of Parliament for the University. It was first held by Isaac Barrow and then in 1669 by Isaac Newton.  He is currently the Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology, at DAMTP in Cambridge. 

Stephen Hawking has worked on the basic laws which govern the universe. With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes. These results indicated that it was necessary to unify General Relativity with Quantum Theory, the other great Scientific development of the first half of the 20th Century. One consequence of such a unification that he discovered was that black holes should not be completely black, but rather should emit radiation and eventually evaporate and disappear. Another conjecture is that the universe has no edge or boundary in imaginary time. This would imply that the way the universe began was completely determined by the laws of science.

His many publications 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. Stephen Hawking has three popular books published; his best seller A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, and most recently in 2010, The Grand Design. There are .pdf and .ps versions of his full publication list.

Professor Hawking has twelve honorary degrees. He was awarded the CBE in 1982, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1989. He is the recipient of many awards, medals and prizes, is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

Stephen Hawking continues to combine family life (he has three children and three grandchildren), and his research into theoretical physics together with an extensive programme of travel and public lectures.

 

Pascal proceeds next to consider the similar problems when the game is won by whoever first obtains m + n points, and one player has m while the other has n points. The answer is obtained using the arithmetical triangle. The general solution (in which the skill of the players is unequal) is given in many modern text-books on algebra, and agrees with Pascal's result, though of course the notation of the latter is different and less convenient.

Pascal made an illegitimate use of the new theory in the seventh chapter of his Pensées. In effect, he puts his argument that, as the value of eternal happiness must be infinite, then, even if the probability of a religious life ensuring eternal happiness be very small, still the expectation (which is measured by the product of the two) must be of sufficient magnitude to make it worth while to be religious. The argument, if worth anything, would apply equally to any religion which promised eternal happiness to those who accepted its doctrines. If any conclusion may be drawn from the statement, it is the undersirability of applying mathematics to questions of morality of which some of the data are necessarily outside the range of an exact science. It is only fair to add that no one had more contempt than Pascal for those who changes their opinions according to the prospect of material benefit, and this isolated passage is at variance with the spirit of his writings.

The last mathematical work of Pascal was that on the cycloid in 1658. The cycloid is the curve traced out by a point on the circumference of a circular hoop which rolls along a straight line. Galileo, in 1630, had called attention to this curve, the shape of which is particularly graceful, and had suggested that the arches of bridges should be built in this form. Four years later, in 1634, Roberval found the area of the cycloid; Descartes thought little of this solution and defied him to find its tangents, the same challenge being also sent to Fermat who at once solved the problem. Several questions connected with the curve, and with the surface and volume generated by its revolution about its axis, base, or the tangent at its vertex, were then proposed by various mathematicians. These and some analogous question, as well as the positions of the centres of the mass of the solids formed, were solved by Pascal in 1658, and the results were issued as a challenge to the world, Wallis succeeded in solving all the questions except those connected with the centre of mass. Pascal's own solutions were effected by the method of indivisibles, and are similar to those which a modern mathematician would give by the aid of the integral calculus. He obtained by summation

what are equivalent to the integrals of , , and , one limit being either 0 or . He also investigated the geometry of the Archimedean spiral. These researches, according to D'Alembert, form a connecting link between the geometry of Archimedes and the infinitesimal calculus of Newton.

In 1609, Galileo heard about the invention of the spyglass, a device which made distant objects appear closer. Galileo used his mathematics knowledge and technical skills to improve upon the spyglass and build a telescope. Later that same year, he became the first person to look at the Moon through a telescope and make his first astronomy discovery. He found that the Moon was not smooth, but mountainous and pitted - just like the Earth! He subsequently used his newly invented telescope to discover four of the moons circling Jupiter, to study Saturn, to observe the phases of Venus, and to study sunspots on the Sun.

Galileo's observations strengthened his belief in Copernicus' theory that Earth and all other planets revolve around the Sun. Most people in Galileo's time believed that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the Sun and planets revolved around it.

The Catholic Church, which was very powerful and influential in Galileo's day, strongly supported the theory of a geocentric, or Earth-centered, universe. After Galileo began publishing papers about his astronomy discoveries and his belief in a heliocentric, or Sun-centered, Universe, he was called to Rome to answer charges brought against him by the Inquisition (the legal body of the Catholic Church). Early in 1616, Galileo was accused of being a heretic, a person who opposed Church teachings. Heresy was a crime for which people were sometimes sentenced to death. Galileo was cleared of charges of heresy, but was told that he should no longer publicly state his belief that Earth moved around the Sun. Galileo continued his study of astronomy and became more and more convinced that all planets revolved around the Sun. In 1632, he published a book that stated, among other things, that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was correct. Galileo was once again called before the Inquisition and this time was found guilty of heresy. Galileo was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1633. Because of his age and poor health, he was allowed to serve his imprisonment under house arrest. Galileo died on January 8, 1642.

Georg Simon Ohm was born in 1787 in Erlangen, Germany. Georg came from a Protestant family. His father, Johann Wolfgang Ohm, was a locksmith and his mother, Maria Elizabeth Beck, was the daughter of a tailor. Although his parents had not been formally educated, Ohm's father was a remarkable man who had educated himself and was able to give his sons an excellent education through his own teachings.

In 1805, Ohm entered the University of Erlangen and received a doctorate. He wrote elementary geometry book while teaching mathematics at several schools. Ohm began experimental work in a school physics laboratory after he had learned of the discovery of electromagnetism in 1820.

In two important papers in 1826, Ohm gave a mathematical description of conduction in circuits modeled on Fourier's study of heat conduction. These papers continue Ohm's deduction of results from experimental evidence and, particularly in the second, he was able to propose laws which went a long way to explaining results of others working on galvanic electricity.

The Moon's Gravity - How much you would weigh on the moon?Your weight on the moon is a function of the moon's gravity. First, we know that gravity is a force that attracts all physical objects towards each other (but why this happens is largely unknown!). Second, the greater the mass of an object, the stronger the force of gravity.

The moon is 1/4 the size of Earth, so the moon's gravity is much less than the earth's gravity, 83.3% (or 5/6) less to be exact. Finally, "weight" is a measure of the gravitational pull between two objects. So of course you would weigh much less on the moon. Imagine how far you could jump on the moon! The Apollo astronauts apparently had fun :-)