The human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Tawakkol Karman has expressed her deepest condolences on the death of British physicist Stephen Hawking. 

Hawking, the renowned theoretical physicist who explored the mysteries of the universe, died today at the age of 76 at his home in Cambridge. 

"May God have mercy on Stephen Hawking! My deepest condolences to his family and and all humanity. Rest in peace," wrote Karman on social media.

He is seen as one of the most influential physicists of the twentieth century and perhaps the most celebrated icon of contemporary science.

Hawking is known for his groundbreaking work on black holes and relativity, and has authored several popular scientific books, including A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. The cosmology treatise has sold approximately 10 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling science books of all time. 

He was born in Oxford in 1942. He was diagnosed with ALS, a disease in which motor neurons die, when he was 21, while a doctoral student in cosmology at the University of Cambridge. 

In the early 1970s, he began to investigate what quantum physics could reveal about the event horizon, a black hole’s surface of no return. Hawking shocked the physics world when he calculated that this surface should slowly emit radiation (soon to become known as Hawking radiation). Black holes were not truly black.