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Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein


March 14 1879 - April 18 1955 Born Ulm, Germany. Died Princeton, USA.

Albert Einstein was a very famous Scientist, he was mostly famous for his
theory of Relativity. In 1894 Einstein's family moved to Milan and Einstein
decided officially to relinquish his German citizenship in favor of Swiss. In
1895 Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to study for
a diploma as an electrical engineer at Zurich. After attending secondary
school at Aarau, Einstein returned (1896) to the Zurich Polytechnic,
graduating (1900) as a secondary school teacher of mathematics and physics.

He worked at the patent office in Bern from 1902 to 1909 and while there
he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written
in his spare time without the benefit of close contact with scientific
literature or colleagues. Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of
Zurich in 1905. In 1908 he became a lecturer at the University of Bern, the
following year becoming professor of physics at the University of Zurich.

By 1909 Einstein was recognized as a leading scientific thinker. After
holding chairs in Prague and Zurich he advanced (1914) to a prestigious post at
the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin. From this time he never taught a
university courses. Einstein remained on the staff at Berlin until 1933, from
which time until his death he held a research position at the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton.

In the first of three papers (1905) Einstein examined the phenomenon
discovered by Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be
emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. The energy of these
quanta was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. This seemed
at odds with the classical electromagnetic theory, based on Maxwell's equations
and the laws of thermodynamics which assumed that electromagnetic energy
consisted of waves which could contain any small amount of...