Stephen Hawking, one of the world’s most well-known scientists, passed away at his home in Cambridge, England today. He was 76. The confirmation of the death of science’s tallest stars came in a statement by his family. “He was a great scientist and an extraordinary man whose work and legacy will live on for many years. His courage and persistence with his brilliance and humour inspired people across the world,” the statement read.

His first major breakthrough came along with Roger Penrose in 1970 when the duo applied the mathematics of black holes to the entire universe and suggested that a singularity, a region of infinite curvature in spacetime, lay in our past, the point from which big bang came. Two years later, he was among the first to show how quantum fluctuations – tiny variations in the distribution of matter – might increase through inflation to the spread of galaxies in the universe.

However, it was A Brief History of Time which brought him to stardom. After staying on Sunday Times’ bestsellers list for close to 237 weeks, the book made to the Guinness Book of Records. The Book was translated into 40 different languages and sold 10 million copies.

Here are some condolences from India and abroad on Stephen Hawking’s death:

He also won a number of awards including the Albert Einstein Award, the Wolf Prize, the Copley Medal, and the Fundamental Physics Prize.