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AlBERT EINSTEIN Biography Physicist , scientist (1879-1955)

Background and early life Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who developed the general theory of relativity, among other feats. He is considered the most influential physicist of the 20th century. Albert Einstein's name has become synonymous with genius but his contributions to science might have been cut short had he stayed in Germany, where he was born on March 14, 1879.

He had already been used to being something of a migrant as, by the age of 17, his parents had already taken him to live in Italy and Switzerland, where he began training to be a physics and math teacher in 1896. His first theoretical paper – on the capillary forces of a straw – was published in a respected journal that same year and by 1905 he was awarded his doctorate by the University of Zurich.

Two years later his work on relativity made him world famous when he concluded that the trajectory of light arriving on Earth from a star would be bent by the gravity of the Sun. He returned to Germany where he held several prestigious positions, including president of the German Physical Society. By 1921, his groundbreaking theories had transformed the basics of modern physics and he was awarded the Nobel Prize . However, it was not given for his most famous work, that of relativity, because it remained too controversial . Instead, the judges used his explanation of the photoelectric effect to explain the award . The famous scientist began to lecture worldwide and travelled to Singapore, Sri Lanka, Palestine and Japan.

Almost immediately after Albert Einstein learned of the atomic bomb's use in Japan, he became an advocate for nuclear disarmament. He formed the Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists and backed Manhattan Project scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in his opposition to the hydrogen bomb.

At his memorial, Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atomic bomb which Einstein had backed, said: “He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness “There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn.”