Albert Einstein
1879–1955 2 entries
Biography
Albert Einstein was a theoretical physicist, born in Ulm in Germany, and one of the most influential scientists of all time. He studied in Zurich, and while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office in Bern he published in 1905 four papers that changed physics, among them the special theory of relativity and the equation E = mc². In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as the curving of space and time. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933 he left Germany for the United States and settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1939 he signed a letter to President Roosevelt warning that an atomic bomb might be built, but he later campaigned for peace and against nuclear weapons. He spent his last decades searching for a unified theory of physics, and he died in Princeton in 1955.
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