Biography | Stephen Hawking — The First That Turned on a Viva in This Quad

People treat Stephen Hawking as a Cambridge story from the first day.

The first degree was taken here, at University College on the High Street in Oxford.

Stephen William Hawking was born in Oxford on 8 January 1942, while his parents' house was still in north London. Oxford was judged safer for a birth in wartime.

The date is the three hundredth anniversary of Galileo Galilei's death.

That coincidence is real. It is not a measured fact about the infant.

Frank Hawking, a research physician, wanted his son at his own college.

University College had no mathematics fellow. Physics was the subject that would get him in.

He sat the scholarship papers in March 1959, aged seventeen. He was awarded an exhibition and came up that autumn to read natural sciences, specialising in physics.

The college mood then punished visible effort. He later wrote that you were supposed to be brilliant without work, or settle for a fourth.

He coxed for the college boat club in his third year. He did not work hard.

At finals he sat on the line between a first and a second.

The examiners called him in for a viva. He told them that a first would send him to Cambridge for research, and a second would keep him in Oxford.

They gave him the first, in 1962.

The main quadrangle he walked through is still the seventeenth-century court on the south side of the High. The porters' lodge still faces the street.

The wartime birthplace in Oxford is not a marked house a visitor can enter. This college is the building that decided the next fifty years.

Photo: University College, Oxford, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: NASA StarChild, public domain