YEREVAN, MARCH 9, ARMENPRESS. Scientist Stephen Hawking has paid tribute to the teacher who inspired his early steps into scholarship.”Armenpress” reports citing BBC.

He says Dikran Tahta at St Albans School opened his eyes to math, which he describes as the "blueprint of the universe".

"My handwriting was bad, and I could be lazy. Many teachers were boring. Not Mr. Tahta," said the physicist.

 Hawking was speaking ahead of this weekend's award of the Global Teacher Prize.

The award-winning scientist has recorded a video commending his teacher, who died in 2006.

"His classes were lively and exciting. Everything could be debated. Together we built my first computer, it was made with electro-mechanical switches," Hawking said.

"Thanks to Mr. Tahta, I became a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Isaac Newton."

Hawking said that "behind every exceptional person, there is an exceptional teacher".

Dikran Tahta was born in 1928. He is the child of Armenian Genocide survivors, who settled in Manchester, who received an Armenian religious education.

He is the author of numerous works in field of mathematics. He died in 2006.