Extraordinary academic recognition

Extraordinary academic recognition
Stephen Hawking. 4 June 1969
Stephen Hawking (1942-2018).

Typed letter signed (‘Stephen Hawking’) to Charles W. Misner, Cambridge, 4 June 1969.

One page, 203 x 164mm, headed notepaper. Provenance: Charles W. Misner.

Hawking is offered the Fellowship for Distinction in Science by Caius. Hawking thanks Misner for acting as his referee. ‘As a result of the recommendations of you and Dennis [Sciama] the College decided not to renew my Research Fellowship but to elect me to a Fellowship for six years. This means that they will pay me if my post at the Institute is not renewed’.

In 1969, at the age of 25, Hawking accepted a Fellowship for Distinction in Science at Gonville and Caius, specially created in recognition of his extraordinary talent, to allow him to remain at the college and continue his valuable research. As well as soliciting a reference from Misner for a post at the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in 1968 [see preceding lot], Hawking requested another in support of an extension of his research fellowship, for which he also called upon his doctoral supervisor Dennis Sciama. Hawking first met the American physicist Charles W. Misner during the latter’s 1966-67 visit to Cambridge at the invitation of Sciama, known as one of the fathers of cosmology, and the two colleagues became close.

Sold to create an endowment in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at the University of Maryland, College Park, in remembrance of the early contributions of the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland, and particularly of Joseph Weber, to the advent of Gravitational Wave Astronomy.