 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| A Brief Biography |
|
| Childhood, Education, and Family |
| Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, to a tightly knit Jewish family. When he was sixteen, his father's business failed, and his family moved to Milan, Italy.
Einstein was a very free thinker and he did not learn well in a formal classroom setting. In Milan, Einstein began studying the one subject that interested him--mathematics. He soon taught himself advanced math, including calculus.
In 1895, Einstein went to Z�rich, Switzerland, to attend the Swiss Polytechnique Institute. In 1903 Einstein married Mileva Maric, who was a classmate from the Polytechnique Institute. The Einsteins eventually had two sons, one who became a professor of engineering at the University of California in Berkeley and one who died in 1965 in a psychiatric hospital. Einstein and Maric also had a daughter one year before they were married, a child whom they gave up for adoption. |
|
| His Career |
|
In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his papers on the photoelectric effect, or the discharge of electrons from metal that has been exposed to light. He explained that the electrons emitted during this effect were a result of frequency, not intensity, as was previously thought.
The work for which Einstein is most famous, however, was his special theory of relativity and the relationship of energy to mass. It was so revolutionary that even Einstein had trouble accepting it. "I must confess," he later stated, "that at the very beginning when the special theory of relativity began to germinate in me, I was visited by all sorts of nervous conflicts." His Special and General Theories of Relativity are discussed in detail elsewhere on this site. In 1914, Einstein went to work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin, and remained there for eighteen years, despite the fact that during his tenure there his marriage fell apart and his wife and children moved to Zurich. During those years, Einstein also came to the United States as a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech). In 1933, during his third visit to CalTech, Hitler came to power in Germany. The Nazis ransacked Einstein's home and took over his bank account. Einstein never returned to Germany. |
|
| In the United States |
|
Einstein took a faculty position at Princeton University in New Jersey, where he remained for the rest of his life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940. Although he was a life-long pacificist, he agreed to help the U.S. effort to build an atomic bomb, out of fears that Hitler's army would develop one first. However, after witnessing the damage of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein was very distraught. "Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb," he said, "I would not have lifted a finger."
Einstein's last years were spent trying to devise, unsuccessfully, a single theory to explain all gravitational and electromagnetic phenomena--something which to this day, no scientist has accomplished. In 1952, Einstein, a longtime supporter of the concept of a Jewish nation, was asked to be president of the newly created state of Israel. He declined, saying, "Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity." He died in New Jersey on April 8, 1955. |
|
|
|
| Continue to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. |
|
[ Edmund Mao 2005 ] |
