Where was stephen hawking born

In the mid-1980s, the National Portrait Gallery commissioned a series of pictures intended to raise the profiles of some contemporary British scientists who were prominent in their fields but little known to the public.

One of these portraits, by Yolanda Sonnabend, was of the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking.

It was the first of several major portraits of the physicist that would be painted over the next 25 years.

These pictures chart not only ordinary ageing but also the progress of Hawking's Motor Neurone Disease (MND), the degenerative condition otherwise known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). They also capture Hawking before, and at various stages of, the global fame that followed the publication of his bestselling book A Brief History of Time in 1988.

It's rare for a scientist to sit for so many important portraits, and even rarer for a disabled person to do so, and considered together the pictures form a compelling visual bi