WORLD-RENOWNED physicist Professor Stephen Hawking is to give a free public lecture at Oxford University.

Prof Hawking will give the inaugural Roger Penrose lecture on the topic of black holes, at the Mathematical Institute at the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in Woodstock Road, on Wednesday, January 18 from 5pm to 6.15pm.

Demand for tickets is expected to be high and the talk will be podcast live.

The professor is based at Cambridge University's Department for Applied Maths and Theoretical Physics.

His title is now the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the department.

The professor was diagnosed with a form of motor neurone disease shortly after his 21st birthday.

With Roger Penrose he showed that Einstein's General Theory of Relativity implied space and time would have a beginning in the Big Bang and an end in black holes.

Among the popular books he has written are A Brief History of Time, Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, The Universe in a Nutshell, The Grand Design and My Brief History.

The father-of-three and grandfather-of-three has 12 honorary degrees and is a Fellow of The Royal Society and a Member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

People can email external-relations@maths.ox.ac.uk to register to attend and visit maths.ox.ac.uk for more details.