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For Professor Stephen Hawking , there'll be no standard message etched on his gravestone.

A remarkable man, it's perhaps no surprise the celebrated theoretical physicist had already planned a very special message to be carved on his grave.

Hawking's most famous and important discovery may have never won him the Nobel Prize , but it did change the way science looked at black holes.

Also known as "Hawking Radiation", his 1974 theory stated that black holes weren't in fact entirely black, but emitted radiation which in time would cause them to "evaporate" and vanish.

It's the equation for the theory that Hawking wanted on his gravestone.

"Hawking Radiation" was to become his most ground-breaking work, challenging how we understood how the universe grew.

Despite the magnitude of "Hawking Radiation", it can be explained in a handful of letters.

According to the Independent , the S that the equation serves to calculate is entropy, which is a complicated but significant part of black holes.

It can be understood as a measure of how much disorder is present in the system.

(Image: PA)

On some forms of the equation, the S also has a little "BH" next to it. The H is for Hawking, and the B stands for Jacob Bekenstein, the other scientist who did so much to help understand black holes.

The numbers are what's required to calculate that entropy.

The h is the Planck constant,; the G is Newton's constant, used to understand gravity; the A refers to the area of the event horizon; the c is the speed of light, made so famous by Einstein's great formula; and the k is Boltzmann's constant.

(Image: Getty Images Europe)

It may sound and look complex to us, but of the equation, Hawking stated in 2002:

"I would like this simple formula to be on my tombstone."