Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. With Eddington's eclipse observations widely reported not just in academic journals but by the popular press as well, Einstein became perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist, a genius who had shattered a paradigm that had been basic to physicists' understanding of the universe since the seventeenth century.

Albert Einstein (/ˈaɪnstaɪn/ EYEN-styne; German: [ˈalbɛɐt ˈʔaɪnʃtaɪn]; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called --the world's most famous equation--. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics --for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect--, a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879. His parents, secular Ashkenazi Jews, were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch. In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold-Gymnasium (now known as the Albert-Einstein-Gymnasium) where he received advanced primary and then secondary school education. In 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examination for the Federal polytechnic school (later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. He failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the test, but performed with distinction in physics and mathematics. Historians of physics are divided on the question of the extent to which Marić contributed to the insights of Einstein's annus mirabilis publications. There is at least some evidence that he was influenced by her scientific ideas, but there are scholars who doubt whether her impact on his thought was of any great significance at all.

What did he do for fun? Albert liked doing puzzles, reading books about nature, and playing violin. He was fascinated by the invisible magnetic force that makes compasses work. And he was very curious about math. Einstein died of a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm on April 18, 1955. He was 76. Smoking makes one roughly eight times more likely to develop an aneurysm; Einstein was a devotee to pipe-smoking.