The 3-Minute series offers the essence of the world's most important figures with all the padding removed.

It divides up their lives into 60 three-minute chunks, each presented as an easily digestible visual snack. Divided into three thematic sections on Life, Works, and Influence each containing an hour's worth of fascinating facts the 3-Minute series is a whole new style of biography. So, who do you get to follow Einstein, the first of our 3-Minute wonders?

Who else could it be but Stephen Hawking, the world's best-known living theoretical physicist, who celebrates his 70th birthday in January 2012. Professor Hawking is one of the great geniuses of our time, but how much do you really know about him and his work. He not only explores the frontiers of space-time, but takes the trouble to come back and try to explain it to us non-science brains down here (A Brief History of Time, 1988).

His intellect and enthusiasm undimmed by the motor neurone disease that hampers his body, his work on gravitational singularities (black holes), the nature of time, and the attempt to reconcile quantum mechanics with Einstein's general relativity is genuinely brain-bending. We are proud that we have condensed it into 3 minute chunks.