Stephen Hawking dies at 76. What was he famous for?

I woke up this morning to the sad news that Stephen Hawking has died. His 1988 book “A Brief History of Time” got me originally interested in physics, and I ended up writing both my diploma thesis and my PhD thesis about black holes. It is fair to say that without Hawking my life would have been an entirely different one.

While Hawking became “officially famous” with “A Brief History of Time,”