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Civilopedia Entry
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Considered the greatest genius of the 20th Century and the most influential theoretical physicist of all time, Albert Einstein had a passion for inquiry that eventually led him to develop the special and the general theories of relativity. Born in 1879 AD in Ulm, his academic career would span seven decades and four countries.
Albert grew up in a secular Jewish home, beginning his education at a Catholic elementary school, and continuing at the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich before transferring to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich when his family relocated to Italy. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and accepted a position as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. While so employed, he obtained his doctorate in 1905.
It was while unhappily married and working a menial job that Einstein did most of his remarkable thinking and writing. In 1905, his avowed “miracle year,” he published four brilliant papers in the 'Annalen der Physik,' the most influential physics journal of the time: on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion, on the matter-energy relationship (E=mc2), and on his own “special theory of relativity.” In 1921 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, not for relativity but for his laws of photo-electricity.
Einstein remained at the Berlin institute until 1933, when he renounced his German citizenship “for political reasons” and emigrated to the United States. Through the years in Berlin and later in the United States, he sought to refine his general theory of relativity and develop a unified field theory (without luck, and a “holy grail” for physicists ever since). Made a professor of theoretical physics at Princeton, he retired in 1945 and died there in 1955 from an aortic aneurysm.