Outside of school, he explored his own path of learning in mathematics and philosophy with a medical student and friend of the family, Max Talmud.Īt 15, after his father’s electrical equipment business failed, he followed his family to Pavia, Italy (not wishing to stay and finish his schooling in Germany), and then on to Aarau, Switzerland, where he finally finished high school. At an early age, his family moved to Munich where Einstein attended a Catholic school and showed an early aptitude for mathematics, particularly geometry and calculus (although he disliked the school's policy of strict memorization, which he thought unhelpful). He was always a little different from other children: his head was slightly larger than normal, and he hardly spoke as a young boy, leading one housekeeper to consider him "retarded". He was named "Person of the Century" by Time magazine in 1999, the fourth most admired person of the 20th Century according to a 1999 Gallup poll, and “the greatest scientist of the twentieth century and one of the supreme intellects of all time” according to “The 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History” in 1978.Īlbert Einstein was born into a non-practising Jewish family in Ulm in the Kingdom of Württemberg, Germany on 14 March 1879. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect” and he made some essential contributions to the early development of quantum theory.
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, best known for his Special and General Theory of Relativity and the concept of mass-energy equivalence expressed by the famous equation, E = mc 2.