Albert Einstein

Einstein was born in Ulm as a subject to 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's borough of Ludwigsvorstadt-Isarvorstadt, where Einstein's father and his uncle Jakob founded Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie, a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current.

When he was very young, his parents worried that he had a learning disability because he was very slow to learn to talk. When he was five and sick in bed, his father brought him a compass. This sparked his lifelong fascination with electromagnetism. He realized that "Something deeply hidden had to be behind things."

Einstein attended St. Peter's Catholic elementary school in Munich from the age of five. When he was eight, he was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he received advanced primary and then secondary school education.

In 1894, Hermann and Jakob's company tendered for a contract to install electric lighting in Munich, but without success—they lacked the capital that would have been required to update their technology from direct current to the more efficient, alternating current alternative. The failure of their bid forced them to sell their Munich factory and search for new opportunities elsewhere. The Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia, where they settled in Palazzo Cornazzani. Einstein, then fifteen, stayed behind in Munich in order to finish his schooling. His father wanted him to study electrical engineering, but he was a fractious pupil who found the Gymnasium's regimen and teaching methods far from congenial. He later wrote that the school's policy of strict rote learning was harmful to creativity. At the end of December 1894, a letter from a doctor persuaded the Luitpold's authorities to release him from its care, and he joined his family in Pavia. While in Italy as a teenager, he wrote an essay titled "On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field".

Einstein excelled at physics and mathematics from an early age, and soon acquired the mathematical expertise normally only found in a child several years his senior. …

Throughout his life, Einstein published hundreds of books and articles. He published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones. On 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Einstein's papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents. In addition to the work he did by himself, he also collaborated with other scientists on additional projects, including the Bose–Einstein statistics, the Einstein refrigerator and others.

Einstein's first paper, submitted in 1900 to Annalen der Physik, was on capillary attraction. It was published in 1901 with the title "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen", which translates as "Conclusions from the capillarity phenomena". Two papers he published in 1902–1903 (thermodynamics) attempted to interpret atomic phenomena from a statistical point of view. These papers were the foundation for the 1905 paper on Brownian motion, which showed that Brownian movement can be construed as firm evidence that molecules exist. His research in 1903 and 1904 was mainly concerned with the effect of finite atomic size on diffusion phenomena.

Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point. Ordinarily, the density fluctuations are controlled by the second derivative of the free energy with respect to the density. At the critical point, this derivative is zero, leading to large fluctuations. The effect of density fluctuations is that light of all wavelengths is scattered, making the fluid look milky white. Einstein relates this to Rayleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue. Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.

The Annus Mirabilis papers are four articles pertaining to the photoelectric effect (which gave rise to quantum theory), Brownian motion, the special theory of relativity, and E = mc that Einstein published in the Annalen der Physik scientific journal in 1905. These four works contributed substantially to the foundation of modern physics and changed views on space, time, and matter. …

While traveling, Einstein wrote daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters Margot and Ilse. The letters were included in the papers bequeathed to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death (she died in 1986). Barbara Wolff, of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.

In his final four years, Einstein was involved with the establishment of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

In 1979, the Albert Einstein Memorial was unveiled outside the National Academy of Sciences building in Washington, D.C. for the Einstein centenary. It was sculpted by Robert Berks. Einstein can be seen holding a paper with three of his most important equations: for the photoelectric effect, general relativity and mass-energy equivalence.

Einstein's right of publicity was litigated in 2015 in a federal district court in California. Although the court initially held that the right had expired, that ruling was immediately appealed, and the decision was later vacated in its entirety. The underlying claims between the parties in that lawsuit were ultimately settled. The right is enforceable, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem is the exclusive representative of that right. Corbis, successor to The Roger Richman Agency, licenses the use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the university.

Mount Einstein in the Chugach Mountains of Alaska was named in 1955. Mount Einstein in New Zealand's Paparoa Range was named after him in 1970 by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research.

In 1999, Einstein was named Time's Person of the Century.

In 1999, a survey of the top 100 physicists voted for Einstein as the "greatest physicist ever", while a parallel survey of rank-and-file physicists gave the top spot to Isaac Newton, with Einstein second.

The physicist Lev Landau ranked physicists from 0 to 5 on a logarithmic scale of productivity and genius, with Newton receiving the highest ranking of 0, followed by Einstein with 0.5, while fathers of quantum mechanics such as Paul Dirac, Niels Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg were ranked 1, with Landau himself a 2.

Science writer John G. …

Einstein became one of the most famous scientific celebrities after the confirmation of his general theory of relativity in 1919. Although most of the public had little understanding of his work, he was widely recognized and admired. In the period before World War II, The New Yorker published a vignette in their "The Talk of the Town" feature saying that Einstein was so well known in America that he would be stopped on the street by people wanting him to explain "that theory". Eventually he came to cope with unwanted enquirers by pretending to be someone else: "Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein."

Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music. He is a favorite model for depictions of absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true". His intellectual achievements and originality made Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.

Many popular quotations are often misattributed to him.

Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The Nobel committee decided that none of the nominations in 1921 met the criteria set by Alfred Nobel, so the 1921 prize was carried forward and awarded to Einstein in 1922.

Einsteinium, a synthetic chemical element, was named in his honor in 1955, a few months after his death.