Albert Einstein, the influential physicist who developed the theory of relativity, was born to a Jewish family in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 1955, when he was 76 years old.
In 1894, his family moved to Milan, Italy, but left Albert behind in boarding school. He dropped out of school and joined them soon afterward, however, so that he would not be drafted into the German army at the age of 16. In 1895, he took the entrance exams for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, in which he excelled in physics and mathematics. He renounced his German citizenship in 1896 and was granted Swiss citizenship in 1901. After graduating, Einstein could not find a teaching position and worked for a few years in a Swiss patent office. It was while he was working in this office that he...
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had time to develop his theory of relativity.
In 1903, he married Mileva Maric, a woman of Serbian descent. In 1919, he divorced Maric and married a cousin of his named Elsa Lowenthal.
Einstein won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He lived during both World War I and World War II, and during those troubled times, he remained a pacifist. Between the wars, he traveled extensively on speaking tours. With the rise of the Nazi movement, Einstein began to be in danger in Germany, and in 1932, he left it and never returned. He settled in New Jersey, becoming a permanent resident of the United States in 1935 and a citizen in 1940, although he also kept his Swiss citizenship. Einstein's equations helped to develop the atomic bomb, but he was not asked to participate in its creation.
Later, after atomic weapons were dropped on Japan, he became part of a group of scientists calling for international controls on nuclear weaponry. He spent the final years of his life working on a unified field theory that would encompass and explain the forces of the entire universe, though he had not completed this work when he died.