a speech to introduce stephen hawking to the occasion of a lecture
Answers
Stephen Hawking, the world's most famous living scientist and a symbol of the triumph of willpower over adversity, has celebrated his 70th birthday, revealing he did not learn to read properly until he was eight years old, and that his schoolfriends had made a bet that he "would never come to anything".
A public symposium in Cambridge was told that, far from being top of the class, he was never more than half-way up. "My classwork was very untidy, and my handwriting was the despair of my teachers," he said. "But my classmates gave me the nickname Einstein, so presumably they saw signs of something better.
"When I was 12, one of my friends bet another friend a bag of sweets that I would never come to anything. I don't know if this bet was ever settled and, if so, which way it was decided."