Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in Germany, on 14 March 1879. He was a quiet baby and his parents became concerned, as he seemed a little backward and slow to speak. When he was 10, Einstein enrolled at the Luitpold Gymnasium (high school). By then, he had already discovered a love for mathematics. His uncle Jakob introduced him to algebra. When Einstein was 12, a family friend Max Talmud, gave him a book about Geometry. Einstein later described this as the single most
After he finished school at the gymnasium Einstein went to Zurich Polytechnic, where he found that student life was the ideal life for him. He went to the lectures he liked and didn’t bother with the rest. There were only five students (including Einstein) taking the science course in Zurich. He graduated with a diploma in mathematics and physics in 1901.
Unable to find a job as a teacher, Einstein accepted a job in the
Swiss Patent office in Berne. In 1903, he married Mileva whom he met
while they were both students. He managed to publish several scientific
papers in spite of lacking an academic position.
However 1905 was the year in which Einstein produced three extraordinary
pieces of work. The first of these was a statistical study of Brownian
motion. This led to a proof that all matter is made up of tiny atoms.
The second was an explanation of the photoelectric effect, in which he
proposed a radical departure from the “wave” theory of light and
interpreted light as a stream of photons. The third paper was the famous
Special Theory of Relativity, in which he proposed that quantities such
as time and distance are not absolute, but depend on the motion of
observers.
Einstein's Photoelectric Equation first appeared in 1905 and
was verified by experiment in 1912:
By 1909, Einstein had been appointed Associate Professor at the University of Zurich.
In 1915, he produced his General Theory of Relativity, which extended his ideas on relativity to the study of forces. General Relativity presented the force of gravity as a curvature of space-time and is considered to be Einstein’s greatest achievement.
In 1921 Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize
for Physics.
