Albert Einstein

Who is Albert Einstein?

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, and grew up in Munich. While working at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, he published four groundbreaking papers in 1905, his annus mirabilis, addressing the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy expressed as E=mc². In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, a new understanding of gravitation confirmed by observations of the 1919 solar eclipse. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded principally for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. A Jewish scientist, he left Germany when the Nazis came to power in 1933 and settled in the United States, joining the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He became an outspoken advocate for pacifism, civil rights, and international cooperation, and remains a global symbol of scientific genius.

Sources: Albert Einstein, 'Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper', Annalen der Physik (1905) · Walter Isaacson, Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007) · The Nobel Prize in Physics 1921 (nobelprize.org)