Thinkers Timeline

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is widely seen as the most influential scientist of the twentieth century. He was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany. His family was secular Jewish and middle class. His father ran an electrochemical business that often struggled. His mother was a musician who pushed Albert to play the violin from age five. He had one younger sister, Maja. As a child, he was shy and slow to speak, but fascinated by science. A compass given to him at age five made him wonder about invisible forces. He found regular school dull. At sixteen he ran away from his German school. He finished his education in Switzerland and entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1896. He graduated in 1900. He could not find a teaching post and took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. There, in his spare time, he produced his most famous work. In 1905, his 'miracle year', he published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equation E=mc². Fame followed slowly. He held professorships in Zurich, Prague, and Berlin. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. Einstein, who was Jewish, was already in the United States and never returned to Germany. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked until his death on 18 April 1955, aged 76.