One of the greatest minds in modern history, physicist Stephen Hawking, died today at the age of 76 in Cambridge after his lifelong battle with ALS. At the age of 22, Hawking was diagnosed with a rare motor neuron disease, known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, that gave him only two years to live. However, he would go on to massively exceed his life expectancy and change science forever, even while being bound to a wheelchair and only able to speak through a speech synthesizer. The great intellectual had many achievements, including writing books such as Black Holes and Baby Universes, The Grand Design, and A Brief History of Time. He would also occasionally guest star on the hit TV series The Big Bang Theory and was played by Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, which told the story of his life. In one of the greatest contributions to modern science, Hawking was one of the first to propose a theory of cosmology as a union of relativity and quantum mechanics. He is survived by his three children, Lucy, Robert, and Tim.