Who was Albert Einstein?
Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist best known for his theories of relativity and the equation E = mc². He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921.
Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879. In 1905, while working at a patent office in Bern, Switzerland, he published four groundbreaking papers. They explained the photoelectric effect, provided evidence for atoms, introduced special relativity and showed that mass and energy are equivalent, summed up in E = mc².
In 1915, he published his general theory of relativity, which describes gravity as the bending of space and time by mass. It was confirmed in 1919, when astronomers observed starlight bending around the Sun during a solar eclipse, making Einstein world-famous. His Nobel Prize was awarded for his work on the photoelectric effect.
Later life
Einstein, who was Jewish, left Germany when the Nazis came to power and settled in the United States in 1933, working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He became a US citizen in 1940 and spoke out for peace and civil rights. He died in 1955.
Did You Know?
Einstein's general relativity predicted gravitational waves, ripples in space-time. Scientists detected them for the first time in 2015, a century after his prediction.