Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm in Germany in 1879 into a Jewish family; he was slow to talk as a child, and his parents feared for a time that he was backward. He hated the rigid drill of the German grammar school and left at sixteen, later entering the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. After graduating he could find no university post, and spent seven years as a technical expert, third class, at the patent office in Bern. In 1905, at twenty-six and in his spare time, he published papers on light quanta, Brownian motion and special relativity, and that year has been called physics' 'miraculous year'. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, and in 1919 British astronomers observing a total solar eclipse confirmed that light is bent in the sun's gravitational field; overnight he became world-famous. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. When the Nazis came to power he moved to the United States and spent the rest of his life at Princeton.