Albert Einstein
Scientist — born 1879
Albert Einstein is popularly known as the Father of Modern Physics.
Albert Einstein, born March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the German Empire, was a theoretical physicist whose work reshaped modern understanding of space, time, gravity, and the nature of light. He grew up in Munich, attended the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, and became a Swiss citizen in 1901 before taking a position at the patent office in Bern.
In 1905, often called his miracle year, Einstein published four papers in the journal Annalen der Physik that addressed the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy expressed as E = mc². The photoelectric paper later earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, recognized as a foundational contribution to quantum theory.
His general theory of relativity, completed in 1915, replaced Newton's account of gravity with a geometric description in which mass and energy curve spacetime. The 1919 solar eclipse expedition led by Arthur Eddington confirmed the predicted bending of starlight and made Einstein an international figure almost overnight.
Einstein left Germany permanently in 1933 after the Nazi rise to power and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he worked until his death on April 18, 1955. He signed a 1939 letter to President Roosevelt warning of the possibility of atomic weapons, advocated civil rights and pacifism in the postwar years, and declined an offer to become president of Israel in 1952.
The name Albert comes from the Old High German Adalberht, joining adal meaning "noble" with beraht meaning "bright." The name spread through medieval Europe and gained renewed popularity in nineteenth-century Britain and America after Queen Victoria's marriage to Prince Albert.