Albert Einstein was born on March 14th 1879 at Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany.

He attended elementary
school at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich, but he was not happy and struggled with the regime. He
enjoyed classical music and played the violin.

In 1889 a Polish medical student, Max Talmud, frequently visited the family and became a tutor to
Einstein, introducing him to higher mathematics and philosophy. As a result of one of the books he was
introduced to, Einstein began to wonder what a light beam would look like if you could run alongside it
at the same speed. If light were a wave, then the light beam should appear stationary. Yet, in reality, the
light beam is moving. This paradox led him to write his first scientific paper at 16, “The Investigation of
the State of Ether in Magnetic Fields.”

In 1894, the family moved to Milan, Italy. Einstein subsequently renounced his German citizenship to
avoid military service and enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich.

Einstein married Maleva Maric in1903. In May, 1904 they had their first son, Hans Albert, and then a
second son, Eduard in 1910. He divorced in 1919 and then married Elsa Löwenthal in the same year.

Whilst studying James Maxwell’s description of the nature of light, Einstein discovered that the speed of
light was constant, which conflicted with Isaac Newton‘s laws of motion, and it was this realisation that
led Einstein to formulate the principle of relativity.

In 1905 he submitted a paper for his doctorate at the Polytechnic Academy in Zurich and in the same
year published four papers in the physics journal, Annalen der Physik. These were the Photoelectric
Effect, Brownian Motion, Special Relativity, and the Equivalence of Matter and Energy E=mc2.

Einstein subsequently went to the University of Berlin, as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for
Physics from 1913 to 1933.

In November 1915, Einstein completed the General Theory of Relativity, which he considered correct
because it accurately predicted the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit around the sun, which fell short in
Newton’s theory. This theory also predicted a measurable deflection of light around the sun when a
planet orbited nearby, and it was confirmed by observations made by Sir Arthur Eddington during the
solar eclipse of 1919. In 1921, Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his explanation of
the photoelectric effect, rather than his work on relativity, which was considered controversial.

In December, 1932 Einstein decided to leave Germany because of the Nazis. He took a position at the
Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1940. He also helped
with charities working with refugees arriving from Germany.

In the summer of 1939, Einstein became aware of Germany’s success with the fission of the Uranium
atom and wrote a letter to President Roosevelt to alert him of the possibility of a Nazi bomb. Roosevelt
invited Einstein to meet with him and this led to the Manhattan Project.

He spent the rest of his career trying to develop a unified field theory for the forces of the universe,
refuting the accepted interpretation of quantum physics. However, in his later years, he stopped
opposing quantum theory and tried to incorporate it, along with light and gravity, into the larger unified
field theory he was trying to develop.

On April 17, 1955 he died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm.