Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in Wurttemberg (German Empire), and died on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey (United States), was a theoretical physicist. He was successively German, stateless (1896), Swiss (1901), and of dual Swiss – American nationality (1940). He married Mileva Einstein-Maric, then his cousin Elsa Einstein.
He published his theory of special relativity in 1905 and his theory of gravitation called general relativity in 1915. He contributed greatly to the development of quantum mechanics and cosmology and received the Nobel Prize in physics of 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect.
His work is notably known to the general public for the equation E = mc², which establishes an equivalence between the mass and the energy of a system.
He is considered today as one of the greatest scientists in history, and his fame goes far beyond the scientific community. It is the personality of the 20th century according to the weekly Time. In popular culture, his name and his person are directly linked to the notions of intelligence, knowledge, and genius.
Early Life and Training of Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Son of a small Jewish industrialist, in 1880 he moved with his family to the city of Munich.
At the age of six, encouraged by his mother, he began to study the violin. Early on, he excelled in the study of physics, mathematics, and philosophy. After secondary school in Ulm, he joined the Polytechnic Institute of Zurich, Switzerland, wherein 1900 he completed his degree in Physics.
In 1901 he wrote his first scientific article “Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field”. In February of that same year, he received Swiss citizenship. He accepted a place in the patent department in Bern. On January 6, 1903, he married Mileva Maric, with whom he had three children.
Theory of Relativity (initial formulation)
In 1905, the year in which he completed his doctorate, Albert Einstein sent thirty pages with four articles to the “Annalen der Physik”, Leipzig, Germany, among them the “initial formulation” of his famous “Theory of Relativity”, which revealed to the world an entirely new view of the Universe.
He proposed a formula for the equivalence between mass and energy the famous equation E = mc², whereby the energy (E) of a quantity of matter, with mass (m), is equal to the product of mass by the square of the speed of light, represented by (c).
After the articles were published, his talent was recognized. In 1909, at the age of 30, he became a professor of physics at the University of Zurich, and the following year he was teaching at the University of Prague (which was part of the Auto-Hungarian Empire).
In 1912 he held the chair of Physics at the Federal Polytechnic School of Switzerland. In 1913, he was appointed professor for the University of Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics. Becomes a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Theory of General Relativity
On November 25, 1915, he took the stage at the Prussian Academy of Sciences and claimed to have completed his exhaustive decade-long search for a new and deeper understanding of gravity. The Theory of General Relativity, Einstein said, was ready.