A Brilliant Mind: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein is undoubtedly one of the greatest minds of our time. His contributions to physics and mathematics are extensive. He was one of science’s first celebrities. Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 at Ulm, in Wurttemberg, Germany (Nobel). His parents, Hermann and Pauline Einstein, were Jewish middle-class Germans, and his uncle was an engineer (Formative). Six weeks after his birth, his family moved to Munich (Nobel).

Einstein began his schooling in Munich at the Luitpold Gymnasium (Nobel). He generally received good grades and was outstanding in mathematics, but he hated the academic high school that he attended in Munich, “where success depended on memorization and obedience to arbitrary authority” (Formative). His studying was mainly done at home with mathematics, physics, and philosophy books (Formative). In 1894, when Einstein was 15, his parents moved to Italy, and six months later, he left the Munich without finishing his schooling to join his family in Pavia, Italy (Grosz). In 1895, he took the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and failed (Formative). He renounced his German citizenship in 1896 (Grosz). He continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and he entered the Swiss Federal Technical School in Zurich in 1896 to be trained as a mathematics and physics teacher (Nobel). Around this time, he realized that physics was his true subject (Formative). A romance arose at the Zurich Polytechnic between Einstein and Mileva Maric, the only woman in his physics class (Formative). Einstein’s family opposed any talk of marriage, even when Mileva gave birth to a daughter, who was probably given up for adoption (Formative).

He gained his diploma and acquired ...

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...dollars as a contribution to the American war effort (Grosz).

Einstein was shattered by the Holocaust and was then shocked by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Grosz). After the war ended, he expressed public support for the formation of a world government and began intense activity on behalf of disarmament (Grosz). He supported creation of the State of Israel (Grosz). He was asked to become the president of Israel in 1952, but he turned it down (“Albert”). He retired in 1945 and spent much of his time giving lectures and speeches (“Albert”). His health began to decline. Einstein died on April 18, 1955 at the age of 76 at the Princeton Hospital of an aortic aneurysm (Grosz). His body was cremated and the ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location (Grosz). In 2000, Albert Einstein was named Person of the Century by Time Magazine(“Albert”).