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By the time Albert
Einstein died at the age of 76, he had totally transformed the way that we
see the universe, including our very notions of space and time. Not bad
for someone who struggled at school.
Einstein was born in
Ulm, Germany in 1879. As a schoolboy, his work didn't scream
"genius" and even his teachers found it hard to reconcile the
student they had known with the great scientist he later became. After
finally graduating from the Polytechnic School in Zurich, he couldn't find
a job in a university so he worked for the Swiss Patent Office and spent
his spare time working on theoretical physics problems.
The time that Einstein
spent thinking about physics rather than patent applications was well
spent and in 1905, whilst still at the patent office, he published three
papers in the leading German physics journal, Annalen der Physik. These
papers on Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect and special relativity
contained explanations and ideas that changed the way we all view the
world. At the age of just 26, Einstein's had produced not one, but three
groundbreaking pieces of work.
 By
the time he finally found an academic job in 1909, Einstein's reputation
as one of the greatest scientists of all time was spreading rapidly. And
in 1915, at the age of 36, Einstein produced his theory of general
relativity which delved even further into the workings of the universe.
But Einstein's private
life was not as successful as his academic life. In 1903 he married his
first wife, Mileva Marie, but not before they had a daughter, Lieserl, who
they put up for adoption in 1902. Einstein and Mileva also had two sons,
Hans Albert in 1904 and Eduard in 1910, but by 1914 divorce proceedings
had started. And in 1919, Einstein married his cousin, Elsa, who had
nursed him through serious illness.
After being awarded the
1921 Nobel Prize for physics for his work on the photoelectric effect,
Einstein became closely involved with the development of quantum theory
before moving on to pursue the search for a grand unified theory that
would tie all of physics together.
In 1933, Einstein
escaped the persecution of Jews by Nazi Germany by accepting a position at
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA where he spent the rest
of his life. Einstein was a pacifist and although he initially supported
the use of atomic weapons as a deterrent in the Second World War he later
campaigned for nuclear disarmament and world peace.
Einstein died in 1955
of heart failure and became an icon of genius.
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