138 Facts About Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time.

Albert Einstein's work is known for its influence on the philosophy of science.

Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory.

In 1905, a year sometimes described as his annus mirabilis, Albert Einstein published four groundbreaking papers.

Albert Einstein thought that the laws of classical mechanics could no longer be reconciled with those of the electromagnetic field, which led him to develop his special theory of relativity.

Albert Einstein then extended the theory to gravitational fields; he published a paper on general relativity in 1916, introducing his theory of gravitation.

Albert Einstein continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules.

Albert Einstein investigated the thermal properties of light and the quantum theory of radiation, which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light.

Albert Einstein was born in the German Empire, but moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship the following year.

Albert Einstein objected to the policies of the newly elected Nazi government; he settled in the United States and became an American citizen in 1940.

Albert Einstein supported the Allies but generally denounced the idea of nuclear weapons.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Wurttemberg in the German Empire, on 14 March 1879 into a family of secular Ashkenazi Jews.

Albert Einstein's parents were Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and Pauline Koch.

Albert Einstein attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, from the age of five, for three years.

In search of business, the Albert Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and a few months later to Pavia.

Albert Einstein's father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with the authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method.

Albert Einstein later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought was lost in strict rote learning.

Albert Einstein excelled at math and physics from a young age, reaching a mathematical level years ahead of his peers.

The 12-year-old Albert Einstein taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry over a single summer.

Albert Einstein independently discovered his own original proof of the Pythagorean theorem aged 12.

Albert Einstein started teaching himself calculus at 12, and as a 14-year-old he says he had "mastered integral and differential calculus".

At the age of 13, when he had become more seriously interested in philosophy, Albert Einstein was introduced to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

In 1895, at the age of 16, Albert Einstein took the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal polytechnic school in Zurich.

Albert Einstein failed to reach the required standard in the general part of the examination, but obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics.

In January 1896, with his father's approval, Albert Einstein renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom of Wurttemberg to avoid military service.

Albert Einstein was the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course.

Albert Einstein wrote in his letters to Maric that he preferred studying alongside her.

In 1900, Albert Einstein passed the exams in Maths and Physics and was awarded a Federal teaching diploma.

Early correspondence between Albert Einstein and Maric was discovered and published in 1987 which revealed that the couple had a daughter named "Lieserl", born in early 1902 in Novi Sad where Maric was staying with her parents.

In May 1904, their son Hans Albert Einstein was born in Bern, Switzerland.

In letters revealed in 2015, Albert Einstein wrote to his early love Marie Winteler about his marriage and his strong feelings for her.

Albert Einstein married Lowenthal in 1919, after having had a relationship with her since 1912.

In 1923, Albert Einstein fell in love with a secretary named Betty Neumann, the niece of a close friend, Hans Muhsam.

Later, after the death of his second wife Elsa, Albert Einstein was briefly in a relationship with Margarita Konenkova.

Albert Einstein's mother cared for him and he was committed to asylums for several periods, finally, after her death, being committed permanently to Burgholzli, the Psychiatric University Hospital in Zurich.

Albert Einstein acquired Swiss citizenship in February 1901, but was not conscripted for medical reasons.

On 30 April 1905 Albert Einstein completed his dissertation, A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions with Alfred Kleiner, serving as pro-forma advisor.

Albert Einstein's thesis was accepted in July 1905, and Einstein was awarded a PhD on 15 January 1906.

Albert Einstein became a full professor at the German Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague in April 1911, accepting Austrian citizenship in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to do so.

Albert Einstein studied continuum mechanics, the molecular theory of heat, and the problem of gravitation, on which he worked with mathematician and friend Marcel Grossmann.

Albert Einstein assumed his position with the academy, and Berlin University, after moving into his Dahlem apartment on 1 April 1914.

In 1916, Albert Einstein was elected president of the German Physical Society.

In 1911, Albert Einstein used his 1907 equivalence principle to calculate the deflection of light from another star by the Sun's gravity.

In 1913, Albert Einstein improved upon those calculations by using the curvature of spacetime to represent the gravity field.

Albert Einstein was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1921.

Albert Einstein received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in 1925.

Albert Einstein visited New York City for the first time on 2 April 1921, where he received an official welcome by Mayor John Francis Hylan, followed by three weeks of lectures and receptions.

Albert Einstein went on to deliver several lectures at Columbia University and Princeton University, and in Washington, he accompanied representatives of the National Academy of Sciences on a visit to the White House.

Albert Einstein published an essay, "My First Impression of the USA", in July 1921, in which he tried briefly to describe some characteristics of Americans, much as had Alexis de Tocqueville, who published his own impressions in Democracy in America.

Albert Einstein was greeted as if he were a head of state, rather than a physicist, which included a cannon salute upon arriving at the home of the British high commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel.

Albert Einstein visited Spain for two weeks in 1923, where he briefly met Santiago Ramon y Cajal and received a diploma from King Alfonso XIII naming him a member of the Spanish Academy of Sciences.

From 1922 to 1932, Albert Einstein was a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations in Geneva, a body created to promote international exchange between scientists, researchers, teachers, artists, and intellectuals.

Albert Einstein's visit was initiated by Jorge Duclout and Mauricio Nirenstein with the support of several Argentine scholars, including Julio Rey Pastor, Jakob Laub, and Leopoldo Lugones.

In December 1930, Albert Einstein visited America for the second time, originally intended as a two-month working visit as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology.

Albert Einstein's friendship with Millikan was "awkward", as Millikan "had a penchant for patriotic militarism", where Einstein was a pronounced pacifist.

Walter Isaacson, Albert Einstein's biographer, described this as "one of the most memorable scenes in the new era of celebrity".

In February 1933, while on a visit to the United States, Albert Einstein knew he could not return to Germany with the rise to power of the Nazis under Germany's new chancellor, Adolf Hitler.

Albert Einstein was now without a permanent home, unsure where he would live and work, and equally worried about the fate of countless other scientists still in Germany.

Albert Einstein rented a house in De Haan, Belgium, where he lived for a few months.

Locker-Lampson took Albert Einstein to meet Winston Churchill at his home, and later, Austen Chamberlain and former Prime Minister Lloyd George.

Albert Einstein asked them to help bring Jewish scientists out of Germany.

Albert Einstein later contacted leaders of other nations, including Turkey's Prime Minister, Ismet Inonu, to whom he wrote in September 1933 requesting placement of unemployed German-Jewish scientists.

Albert Einstein had offers from several European universities, including Christ Church, Oxford, where he stayed for three short periods between May 1931 and June 1933 and was offered a five-year research fellowship, but in 1935, he arrived at the decision to remain permanently in the United States and apply for citizenship.

Albert Einstein was one of the four first selected at the new Institute.

Albert Einstein soon developed a close friendship with Godel; the two would take long walks together discussing their work.

Albert Einstein was asked to lend his support by writing a letter, with Szilard, to President Roosevelt, recommending the US pay attention and engage in its own nuclear weapons research.

Albert Einstein recognized the "right of individuals to say and think what they pleased" without social barriers.

Albert Einstein joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Princeton, where he campaigned for the civil rights of African Americans.

Albert Einstein considered racism America's "worst disease", seeing it as "handed down from one generation to the next".

In 1946, Albert Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a historically black college, where he was awarded an honorary degree.

Albert Einstein has said, "Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how black people feel as victims of discrimination".

In 1918, Albert Einstein was one of the founding members of the German Democratic Party, a liberal party.

Albert Einstein strongly advocated the idea of a democratic global government that would check the power of nation-states in the framework of a world federation.

Albert Einstein was deeply impressed by Mahatma Gandhi, with whom he exchanged written letters.

Albert Einstein described Gandhi as "a role model for the generations to come".

Albert Einstein was a figurehead leader in helping establish the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened in 1925.

Albert Einstein made suggestions for the creation of an Institute of Agriculture, a Chemical Institute and an Institute of Microbiology in order to fight the various ongoing epidemics such as malaria, which he called an "evil" that was undermining a third of the country's development.

Albert Einstein promoted the establishment of an Oriental Studies Institute, to include language courses given in both Hebrew and Arabic.

Albert Einstein was not a nationalist and was against the creation of an independent Jewish state, which would be established without his help as Israel in 1948.

Albert Einstein felt that the waves of arriving Jews of the Aliyah could live alongside existing Arabs in Palestine.

Albert Einstein wrote that he was "deeply moved", but "at once saddened and ashamed" that he could not accept it.

Albert Einstein spoke of his spiritual outlook in a wide array of original writings and interviews.

Albert Einstein said he had sympathy for the impersonal pantheistic God of Baruch Spinoza's philosophy.

Albert Einstein did not believe in a personal god who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings, a view which he described as naive.

Albert Einstein clarified that "I am not an atheist", preferring to call himself an agnostic, or a "deeply religious nonbeliever".

Albert Einstein was primarily affiliated with non-religious humanist and Ethical Culture groups in both the UK and US.

Albert Einstein served on the advisory board of the First Humanist Society of New York, and was an honorary associate of the Rationalist Association, which publishes New Humanist in Britain.

Albert Einstein had been sympathetic toward vegetarianism for a long time.

Albert Einstein became a vegetarian himself only during the last part of his life.

Albert Einstein developed an appreciation for music at an early age.

Albert Einstein's mother played the piano reasonably well and wanted her son to learn the violin, not only to instill in him a love of music but to help him assimilate into German culture.

Albert Einstein said that "love is a better teacher than a sense of duty".

Albert Einstein is sometimes erroneously credited as the editor of the 1937 edition of the Kochel catalog of Mozart's work; that edition was prepared by Alfred Einstein, who may have been a distant relation.

On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which had previously been reinforced surgically by Rudolph Nissen in 1948.

Albert Einstein took the draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the state of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live to complete it.

Albert Einstein's remains were cremated in Trenton, New Jersey, and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.

Albert Einstein bequeathed his personal archives, library, and intellectual assets to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

Albert Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and 150 non-scientific ones.

On 5 December 2014, universities and archives announced the release of Albert Einstein's papers, comprising more than 30,000 unique documents.

In 13 December 1900, a first article on capillarity signed only under Albert Einstein's name was submitted.

Albert Einstein returned to the problem of thermodynamic fluctuations, giving a treatment of the density variations in a fluid at its critical point.

Albert Einstein relates this to Rayleigh scattering, which is what happens when the fluctuation size is much smaller than the wavelength, and which explains why the sky is blue.

Albert Einstein quantitatively derived critical opalescence from a treatment of density fluctuations, and demonstrated how both the effect and Rayleigh scattering originate from the atomistic constitution of matter.

Albert Einstein originally framed special relativity in terms of kinematics.

Albert Einstein adopted Minkowski's formalism in his 1915 general theory of relativity.

In 1911, Albert Einstein published another article "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light" expanding on the 1907 article, in which he estimated the amount of deflection of light by massive bodies.

In 1916, Albert Einstein predicted gravitational waves, ripples in the curvature of spacetime which propagate as waves, traveling outward from the source, transporting energy as gravitational radiation.

Albert Einstein's prediction was confirmed on 11 February 2016, when researchers at LIGO published the first observation of gravitational waves, detected on Earth on 14 September 2015, nearly one hundred years after the prediction.

Albert Einstein formulated an argument that led him to conclude that a general relativistic field theory is impossible.

Albert Einstein gave up looking for fully generally covariant tensor equations and searched for equations that would be invariant under general linear transformations only.

In 1917, Albert Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to the structure of the universe as a whole.

Albert Einstein discovered that the general field equations predicted a universe that was dynamic, either contracting or expanding.

In each of these models, Albert Einstein discarded the cosmological constant, claiming that it was "in any case theoretically unsatisfactory".

In late 2013, a team led by the Irish physicist Cormac O'Raifeartaigh discovered evidence that, shortly after learning of Hubble's observations of the recession of the nebulae, Albert Einstein considered a steady-state model of the universe.

Albert Einstein argued that this is true for a fundamental reason: the gravitational field could be made to vanish by a choice of coordinates.

Albert Einstein maintained that the non-covariant energy momentum pseudotensor was, in fact, the best description of the energy momentum distribution in a gravitational field.

Albert Einstein regarded this as an "independent fundamental assumption" that had to be postulated in addition to the field equations in order to complete the theory.

Accordingly, Albert Einstein proposed that the field equations would determine the path of a singular solution, like a black hole, to be a geodesic.

Albert Einstein concluded that each wave of frequency f is associated with a collection of photons with energy hf each, where h is Planck's constant.

In 1907, Albert Einstein proposed a model of matter where each atom in a lattice structure is an independent harmonic oscillator.

Albert Einstein was aware that getting the frequency of the actual oscillations would be difficult, but he nevertheless proposed this theory because it was a particularly clear demonstration that quantum mechanics could solve the specific heat problem in classical mechanics.

In 1924, Albert Einstein received a description of a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, based on a counting method that assumed that light could be understood as a gas of indistinguishable particles.

Albert Einstein noted that Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and submitted his translation of Bose's paper to the Zeitschrift fur Physik.

In "Uber die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen uber das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung", on the quantization of light, and in an earlier 1909 paper, Albert Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have well-defined momenta and act in some respects as independent, point-like particles.

In 1917, at the height of his work on relativity, Albert Einstein published an article in Physikalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical process that makes possible the maser and the laser.

Albert Einstein discovered Louis de Broglie's work and supported his ideas, which were received skeptically at first.

Albert Einstein played a major role in developing quantum theory, beginning with his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect.

Albert Einstein was skeptical that the randomness of quantum mechanics was fundamental rather than the result of determinism, stating that God "is not playing at dice".

In 1935, Albert Einstein returned to quantum mechanics, in particular to the question of its completeness, in a collaboration with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen that laid out what would become known as the EPR paradox.

Albert Einstein rejected this second possibility.

Margot Albert Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death.

Barbara Wolff, of the Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955.

Albert Einstein became one of the most famous scientific celebrities, beginning with the confirmation of his theory of general relativity in 1919.

Albert Einstein finally figured out a way to handle the incessant inquiries.

Albert Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films, plays, and works of music.

Albert Einstein is a favorite model for depictions of absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated.

Time magazine's Frederic Golden wrote that Albert Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true".

Albert Einstein received numerous awards and honors, and in 1922, he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect".