London - British physicist Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned author of A Brief History of Time, was admitted to hospital in the university city of Cambridge Monday where he was described as being "very ill."

The 67-year-old scientists, who is wheelchair bound and speaks with the help of a voice synthesiser as a result of motor neurone disease, was taken to hospital for tests.

"Professor Hawking is very ill and has today been taken by ambulance to Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge," said a University spokesman.

"He is undergoing tests. He has been unwell for a couple of weeks."

Hawking was born in Oxford where he later read physics at University College Oxford before moving to Cambridge to carry out research in cosmology.

He made a zero-gravity space flight in 2007 and was last seen in public last September.

Hawking worked at Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics for more than 30 years and since 1979 has been the University's Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. (dpa)