Stephen as a young adult
Hawking has named his secondary school mathematics teacher Dikran Tahta as an inspiration, and originally wanted to study the subject at university. However, Hawking's father wanted him to apply to University College, Oxford, which his father had attended. As University College did not have a mathematics fellow at that time, they did not accept applications from students who wished to study that discipline. Therefore, Hawking applied to study natural sciences with an emphasis in physics. University College accepted Hawking, and he gained a scholarship. While at Oxford, he coxed a rowing team, which helped ease his immense boredom at the university. His physics tutor, Robert Berman, later said "It was only necessary for him to know that something could be done, and he could do it without looking to see how other people did it. ... his mind was completely different from all of his contemporaries".Hawking's unimpressive study habits resulted in a final examination score on the borderline between first and second class honors making an oral examination necessary. Berman commented: "the examiners then were intelligent enough to realize they were talking to someone far more clever than most of themselves". After receiving his B.A. degree at Oxford in 1962, he left for graduate work at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.When Hawking began his graduate studies in the 1960s, there was much debate in the physics community about the opposing theories of the creation of the universe: big bang, and steady state. Hawking and his Cambridge friend and colleague, Roger Penrose, showed in 1970 that if the universe obeys general relativity and fits any of the Friedmann models, then it must have begun as a singularity. This work showed that, far from being mathematical curiosities which appear only in exceptional circumstances, singularities are a fairly common feature of general relativity. For their essay on this subject, Hawking and Penrose were jointly awarded the Adams prize in 1966. This essay served as the basis for a textbook, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, that Hawking published with George Ellis in 1973. In 1969, Hawking accepted a specially created 'Fellowship for Distinction in Science' to remain at Cambridge. In the early 1970s, Hawking's work with Brandon Carter, Werner Israel and D. Robinson strongly supported John Wheeler's no-hair theorem – that any black hole can be fully described by the three properties of mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. With Bardeen and Carter, he proposed the four laws of black hole mechanics, drawing an analogy with thermodynamics. In 1974, he calculated that black holes should emit radiation, known today as Hawking radiation, until they exhaust their energy and evaporate.