Stephen Hawking By The Numbers

It's strange that someone, or some organization, would keep such a statistics, but here they are. I found a website that compiled a bunch of "interesting" stats about the life of Stephen Hawking so far.

1 Word Per Minute

The rate at which Hawking currently communicates by moving his cheek muscles to express one letter at a time.

1,000

The number of hours that Hawking estimates he spent studying in three years at the University of Oxford, where he found the course work “ridiculously easy.”

21 

The age at which Hawking begin to experience the symptoms of ALS.

2

The number of wives Hawking has had.

1984 

The year Hawking completed A Brief History of Time, his first work for the general public, which he wrote to help pay for his three children’s education expenses.

1990

The year that Hawking left his first wife, Jane, for one of his nurses, Elaine Mason, whom he later married and divorced.

237

The record number of weeks A Brief History of Time stayed on the Sunday Times’ bestseller list.

10 million

The number of books Hawking has sold (“I have sold more books on physics than Madonna has on sex,” he bragged).

25 seconds

How long Hawking escaped gravity and the confines of his wheelchair in 2007 when he became the first person with a disability to fly on one of the zero gravity flights offered by Zero Gravity Corp., a space tourism company.

2011

The year that Hawking pronounced (a) that “philosophy is dead” at Google’s Zeitgeist Conference and (b) that heaven is a “fairy story” for people afraid of death.

The media and public fascination on Hawking continues....

Zz.