Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Clarke was born in Minehead, Somerset, England and was interested in science since an early age. During the Second World War from 1941 to 1946, Clarke served in the Royal Air Force, specializing in radar and eventually rising to the rank of flight-lieutenant.
After the war Clarke entered King's College, London, and got his B.Sc. with honours in physics and mathematics in 1948. From 1949 to 1951 he was an assistant editor of Physics Abstracts. Since 1952 Clarke worked as a full-time writer. In the 1950s Clarke became interested in undersea exploration. He settled in 1956 permanently in Sri Lanka, where he wrote several fiction and nonfiction books and articles about the Indian Ocean. Clarke suffered from post-polio syndrome in 1962, and was confined to a wheelchair.
Celebrating his 90th birthday in December, 2007, Clarke wished for peace in Sri Lanka, for mankind to break its fossil fuel habit, and for the discovery of extraterrestrial beings. Clarke will be buried at a private funeral in Colombo's General Cemetery on Saturday at 1000 GMT.
"Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth.
--Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this universe, there shines a star." (from Clarke's foreword in 2001, A Space Odyssey, 1968)
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