Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) is the most famous scientist in history and one of humanity's greatest thinkers. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, he struggled in traditional education before revolutionizing physics with a series of papers in 1905 — his "miracle year." In 1905 alone, Einstein published four groundbreaking papers: explaining the photoelectric effect (for which he won the 1921 Nobel Prize), Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence (E=mc²). His general theory of relativity followed in 1915. E=mc² — perhaps the most famous equation in history — describes the relationship between mass and energy, and underpins both nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Einstein's theories of relativity replaced Newtonian mechanics as our fundamental description of space, time, and gravity. Einstein fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and spent his final years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, working unsuccessfully toward a unified theory of everything.