Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879-April 18, 1955) was born in Ulm, Germany to Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer, and his wife, Pauline Koch. In a happy coincidence, his birthday 3/14 falls on Pi Day (3.1415) linking the great theoretical physicist with the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. From age 5 to 8, he attended a Catholic elementary school in Munich, later transferring to the Luitpold-Gymnasium to complete his primary and part of his secondary education. That gymnasium today in named for him.
Before he was 13, Einstein discovered an original proof of the Pythagorean theorem, and had read and enjoyed Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. When he was 15, the family moved to Italy and he joined them in Pavia a year later. He relocated to Aarau, Switzerland, where he completed his secondary education at the Argovian cantorial school. He graduated in 1896, the same year that he renounced his German citizenship to avoid conscription into military service. At 17, he enrolled in a 4-year mathematics and physics teaching program, there meeting classmate Mileva Maric, whom he married in 1902.
Following his graduation from the federal polytechnic school in 1900, Swiss authorities found he was medically unfit for military service. He applied for a teaching position at numerous Swiss schools, but none accepted him. Finally in 1902 he secured a post in Bern at the Swiss Patent Office as an assistant examiner. Friends interested in science and philosophy formed a club with Einstein, which they named the Olympia Academy. Einstein was awarded a doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1906, a year after publishing a paper on mass-energy equivalence, best known for the formula E=mc2. (Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared.)
Albert and Mileva Einstein had had a son Hans Albert in 1904, and another son, Eduard in 1910. In letters to a childhood friend, Marie Winteler, he confessed he was unhappy in his marriage. He had an affair with Elsa Lowenthal, a cousin, leading Mileva to move out, taking their two sons with her. The couple was divorced in 1919 on grounds of having lived apart for five years. As part of the divorce settlement, he promised if he won the Nobel Prize, she would receive the prize money.
In 1908, Einstein secured a junior teaching position at the University of Bern. He gave a lecture on electrodynamics at the University of Zurich, leading to him being offered and accepting an associate professorship at the University of Zurich with advancement in April 1911 to a full professorship at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, which required him to become an Austrian citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1912, however, he returned to ETH Zurich, his alma mater, to take the chairmanship in theoretical physics. The following year he was persuaded by Max Planck and Walther Nernst to accept a chair at the Humboldt University of Berlin, along with the directorship of the planned Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics.
A total eclipse of the sun on May 29, 1919 provided an opportunity to put Einstein’s theory of gravitational lensing to a test, and Sir Arthur Eddington found that, as Einstein had predicted, light in fact did bend. This caused a sensation, resulting in Einstein becoming a celebrity scientist. During a tour of the United States, he was given a receptions by Mayor John Francis Hylan of New York, gave lectures at Columbia and Princeton, and visited the White House with other scientists.
In 1920, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
After marrying Lowenthal in 1919, he began an affair with a secretary Betty Neumann. Lowenthal remained loyal to him, accompanying him when he immigrated to the United States in 1933. She died in December 1936 of heart and kidney problems. Einstein had several affairs during and after his marriage, but never married again.
In 1922, Einstein toured much of Asia, meeting Japan’s Emperor Yoshihito at the Imperial Palace, and thousands of spectators in Tokyo lined up to catch a glimpse of him. In Mandatory Palestine, entrusted to Britain following World War I, the British High Commissioner Sir Herbert Samuel welcomed him with a cannon salute. From 1922 to 1932 Einstein participated in the League of Nation’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation as a representative of Germany. Among delegates to the Committee was the Polish chemist Marie Curie. He toured Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina in 1925 and had a repeat tour of the United States in 1930 and 1931. In New York, he received the Key to the City from Mayor Jimmy Walker, saw a full-sized statue of himself that had been commissioned by the Riverside Church, and celebrated Chanukah with 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden. In California, he met Caltech President and fellow Nobel Laureate Robert A. Millikan, a meeting of a pacifist and a militarist. Closer to his pacifist philosophy were Upton Sinclair and Charlie Chaplin, whom he met along with Carl Laemmle, head of Universal Studios. Chaplin had Einstein as his special guest at the premiere of his film City Lights.
With the ascension to the German chancellorship of Adolf Hitler and the beginning of the Nazis’ anti-Jewish laws, Einstein became a refugee in the United States, although he continued to travel elsewhere in Europe. He persuaded Britain’s Winston Churchill and Turkey’s Ismet Inonu to recruit German Jewish scientists to teach in British universities. After bills failed in the United Kingdom to promote Jewish citizenship in Palestine, and to extend temporary shelter to Einstein in Britain, the scientist accepted an offer from Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study to become a resident scholar. In 1935, he applied for U.S. citizenship. His home at Princeton was made a national historic landmark in 1976, 21 years after his death.
In 1939, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner visited Einstein to alert him to the danger of Germany developing an atomic bomb. They asked him and he agreed to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging that the U.S. embark on its own nuclear weapons research, leading to the creation of the Manhattan Project. In 1940, Einstein was naturalized as a U.S. citizen.
He joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, corresponding with Black activist W.E. B. Du Bois. “Being a Jew myself, perhaps I can understand and empathize with how Black people feel as victims of discrimination,” Einstein declared. In 1952, Israel’s Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion offered Einstein the ceremonial position of President of Israel, but he declined the honor.
Pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein’s brain for preservation in the hope that neuroscience in the future could discover what made Einstein so intelligent. The rest of his body was cremated and his ashes were spread in an undisclosed location. Einstein bequeathed his personal archives, library, and intellectual assets to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Tomorrow, March 15, Ruth Bader Ginsburg
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article