Hawking is an honorary member of the Royal Society of Literature and Art and has won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest honorary civilian award awarded by the United States. From 1979 to 2009, Hawking was Lucas Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Hawking wrote many popular science books on his theory and generalized cosmology, which were widely welcomed by the public. Among them, A Brief History of Time: From BIGBANG to Black Hole has topped the bestseller list of British Sunday Times for 237 consecutive weeks.
Hawking's achievements
1, singularity theorem
Hawking and Penrose proved the famous singularity theorem together in 1970s, which won them the Wolf Prize in Physics of 1988. They creatively proved that the general relativity equation leads to the singular point solution by topological method, and indirectly proved the existence of the big bang singularity.
2. Hawking radiation
Hawking proved that black holes radiate like thermodynamic blackbodies by quantum field theory under the background of curved space-time, and thus put forward Hawking radiation.
3. The area theorem of black holes
Hawking also proved the area theorem of black holes, that is, the area of black holes does not decrease with the increase of time, which made him very famous.