STEPHEN HAWKING

Stephen Hawking was regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in
history. His work on the origins and structure of the universe, from the Big Bang to black
holes, revolutionized the field, while his best-selling books have appealed to readers who
may not have Hawking's scientific background. Hawking died on March 14, 2018, at the age
of 76. British cosmologist Stephen William Hawking was born in England on Jan. 8, 1942 —
300 years to the day after the death of the astronomer Galileo Galilei. He attended
University College, Oxford, where he studied physics, despite his father's urging to focus on
medicine. Hawking went on to Cambridge to research cosmology, the study of the universe
as a whole.

In early 1963, just shy of his 21st birthday, Hawking was diagnosed with motor
neuron disease, more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease or amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis (ALS). He was not expected to live more than two years. Completing his doctorate
did not appear likely, but Hawking defied the odds. He attained his PhD in 1966 (Hawking
made his PhD thesis available online in 2017) and he went on to forge new roads into the
understanding of the universe in the decades since.

As the disease spread, Hawking became less mobile and began using a wheelchair.
Talking grew more challenging and, in 1985, an emergency tracheotomy caused his total loss
of speech. A speech-generating device constructed at Cambridge, combined with a software
program, served as his electronic voice, allowing Hawking to select his words by moving the
muscles in his cheek.

About the Big Bang to black hole theory:

The basic idea for the Black Hole Big Bang Theory (BHBBT) is that matter from a
mother universe collapses into a black hole. The singularity of this black hole is at a single
point in space with respect to anyone in the mother universe
References :
https://www.biography.com/scientist/stephen-hawking
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Stephen-Hawking
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2053929-a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-a-legacy-of-paradox/
 STEVE JOBS

Steven Paul Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 in San Francisco, California. His
unwed biological parents, Joanne Schieble and Abdulfattah Jandali, put him up for adoption.
Steve was adopted by Paul and Clara Jobs, a lower-middle-class couple, who moved to the
suburban city of Mountain View a couple of years later.
The Santa Clara county, south of the Bay Area, became known as Silicon Valley in the early
1950s after the sprouting of myriads of semi-conductor companies in the area. As a result,
young Steve Jobs grew up in a neighborhood filled with engineers working on electronics
and other gizmos in their garages on weekends. This shaped his interest in the field as he
grew up. At age 13, he met one the most important persons in his life: 18-year-old Stephen
Wozniak, an electronics whiz-kid —and an incorrigible prankster, much like Steve himself.
Woz, whose interest in electronics had grown stronger, was regularly attending meetings of
a group of early computer hobbyists called the Homebrew Computer Club. They were the
real pioneers of personal computing, a collection of radio jammers, computer professionals
and enlightened amateurs who gathered to show off their latest prowess in building their
own personal computer or writing software. The club started to gain popularity after the
Altair 8800 personal computer kit came out in 1975.
The knowledge that Woz gathered at the Homebrew meetings, as well as his exceptional
talent, allowed him to build his own computer board — simply because he wanted a
personal computer for himself. Steve Jobs took interest, and he quickly understood that his
friend's brilliant invention could be sold to software hobbyists, who wanted to write
software without the hassle of assembling a computer kit. Jobs convinced Wozniak to start a
company for that purpose: Apple Computer was born on April 1, 1976.

About Apple Company:

Apple Inc., formerly Apple Computer, Inc., American manufacturer of personal
computers, smartphones, tablet computers, computer peripherals, and computer software.
It was the first successful personal computer company and the popularizer of the graphical
user interface. Headquarters are located in Cupertino, California.

REFERENCES:
https://allaboutstevejobs.com/bio/short_bio
https://www.notablebiographies.com/Ho-Jo/Jobs-Steve.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steve-Jobs
 MARK ZUCKERBERG

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, and grew up in the suburbs of
New York, Dobbs Ferry. He was the second of four children and the only son in the educated
family. Mark’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen Zuckerberg, who is
a psychiatrist. His father owned a dental practice next to the family house. Mark and his
three sisters, Arielle, Randi, and Donna, were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Mark began
writing software and using computers when he was in middle school. His coding experience
began with learning Atari basic programming, with the help of his father Edward Zuckerberg,
who initially introduced the computer language to the young boy when he was just 6. Mark
was learning so fast, that later daddy needed to hire a professional developer to tutor him.
David Newman was the man, who was given the task to mentor the young Mark

When he eventually went to go to college, he claimed to be able to read and write in

Latin, French, Hebrew, English, and Greek. His overall knowledge and intelligence helped
him excel at college, where he would often recite poems such as the epic ‘The Iliad’. In
college (The Harvard University) he was already known as a “programming prodigy” due to
the work he had done in high school. There he wrote a program he called CourseMatch that
helped students make decisions about the courses they wanted to take based upon the
choices of others. At Harvard, the students had books called “Facebooks.” They had the
pictures and names of people that lived in the student dorms. Mark build a website that
randomly showed two pictures of males and two of females on it. People that visited the site
had to choose which person was hotter. This site went up over one weekend and it was
called Facemash (actually this was the first name of Facebook). It was built ‘just for fun’ but
it became so popular, that the college shut it down because of its popularity. First, it caused
Harvard’s servers to crash (because of the heavy load it caused) and this caused problems
for the students, who wanted to use the Internet for studying. Also, some of them didn’t like
the idea of their pictures being used without permission and Zuckerberg was forced to
publicly apologize for his actions. Facemash was labeled ‘completely improper’ in the articles
that followed in the students’ newspaper.

In 2004 he began writing a new website which he called TheFacebook , working

on thefacebook.com domain (the second name of the network). He had several students
helping him with TheFacebook including Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Chris Hughes
and Dustin Moskovitz, who are actually the other 4 co-founders of the site. The site was
initially just a Harvard site but soon expanded to other colleges and universities. Mark and
friends decided to spread the idea and many other universities were included in the network.
The social project started gaining momentum really fast and Zuckerberg decided to drop out
of college and dedicate his time entirely to the site. He and his team moved to a small house
in Palo Alto, which became the office of the young enterprise. By 2005 “TheFacebook” was
known just like Facebook. The site opened up to anyone over age 13 in 2006. By 2007 the
site had over 100,000 businesses listing their companies on Facebook and creating pages. By
2011 it became the largest digital photograph host and had over 350 million accessing the
site over mobile phones.
REFERENCES:

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/081315/mark-zuckerberg-success-story-net-
worth-education-top-quotes.asp
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mark-Zuckerberg
https://www.biography.com/business-figure/mark-zuckerberg
https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-fabulous-life-career-photos-2017-4
https://businessconnectindia.in/success-story-of-mark-zuckerberg/

NELSON MANDELA

Nelson Mandela was born Rolihlahla Mandela on July 18, 1918, in a rural village in
the Transkei region of South Africa. His name means “troublemaker” in the Xhosa language.
A teacher at a Christian mission school later gave him the name Nelson. Mandela rose from
a humble village of mud huts into a comfortable life as the adopted son of a Tembu chief.
As a young man, Mandela attended university, but was dismissed because he took
part in a student protest, his first act of civil rights activism. In the 1940s, Mandela entered
into the turbulent world of South African racial politics by joining in the liberation movement
known as the African National Congress (A.N.C). Mandela was a founding member of the
African National Congress's Youth League and later become second-in-command. Through
this group, Mandela was able to take organized political action against apartheid. In the
1950s, he was the leader of the African National Congress. The South African government
considered him an enemy.
In 1963, the government put Mandela on trial for treason, condemning him to a
lifetime sentence. Throughout his imprisonment, Mandela continued his work to end
apartheid by sending secret messages from his cell on Robben Island. On February 2, 1990,
 27 years after Mandela was imprisoned, South Africa’s president Frederik Willem de Klerk
removed the ban on the A.N.C and released Mandela. The two men had held meetings
about his release while Mandela was in prison. Three years later, Mandela and de Klerk were
jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Mandela used the joint award to show forgiveness,
and that reconciliation was possible in the deeply politically and racially divided South Africa.
In 1994, Mandela became South Africa's first democratically elected president. He
focused his presidency on building peace and unity in his country. In 1999, at the end of his
term as president, Mandela chose not to seek re-election. He remained politically active,
however, working to promote peace throughout Africa and to draw attention to social
injustice and the spread of HIV and AIDS.

REFERENCES:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Nelson-Mandela
https://www.biography.com/political-figure/nelson-mandela
https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/a-brief-history-of-nelson-mandela-s-life-nelson-mandela-centre-of-
memory/dALiEWID5fOgLA?hl=en

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein was born in Germany on 14 March 1879. Einstein’s parents were
both Jewish and he had a younger sister called Maja. Although he apparently didn’t like
school, Einstein showed he had a great mind for maths and science from a young age. When he
was just five years old, his father bought him a compass. His enquiring mind immediately
started trying to work out just why the needle always pointed north. When Einstein was 15, his
family moved to Milan in Italy. From there he attended the Polytechnic Academy in the Swiss
city of Zurich.

In 1900 Einstein graduated with a degree in physics and maths. Einstein began to make
his mark after he took a job at the Patent Office in Bern, where he looked into other people’s
inventions. While he was there he worked on his own discoveries and found out many things
that became of great importance in the world of physics. Einstein got a job checking out other
people’s inventions because he couldn’t find work as a teacher but at the same time he was
working on his own scientific ideas. He came up with some amazing theories about light,
matter, gravity, space, and time. The group of papers he wrote while working at the Patent
Office in Bern showed just what a great scientific thinker Einstein was. He discovered new ways
to work out the size of molecules, explained how particles move and made new discoveries
about light.

Einstein probably remains most famous for his ‘theory of relativity’ and perhaps the
most famous mathematical equation ever written, E = mc² – which means Energy (e) equals
mass (m) times the speed of light, squared (c²). His theory is even difficult for grown-ups to
fully understand! But the equation shows that mass can be turned into energy and vice versa.
Because the speed of light squared is such a huge number, it means that even a small amount
of mass can be turned into a huge amount of energy.

In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. Albert Einstein died at the
age of 76 from heart failure on 18 April 1955. He had hoped to pull all his ideas together into
one big theory before he died but he didn’t achieve that goal. After he died, Einstein’s brain
was removed and preserved and research was carried out on it to see if there was a reason for
his genius.

REFERENCES:
https://www.biography.com/scientist/albert-einstein
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Albert-Einstein
https://www.sparknotes.com/biography/einstein/summary/
https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1921/einstein/biographical/