Albert Einstein “the genius of the 20th century”

Albert Einstein was born in the German city of Ulm on March 14, 1879. He was the first-born son of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch, both Jews, whose families came from Swabia. The following year they moved to Munich, where the father established himself, together with his brother Jakob, as a merchant in the electrotechnical novelties of the time. Little Albert was a quiet and self-absorbed child, and had a slow intellectual development. In 1894, economic difficulties caused the family (increased since 1881 with the birth of a daughter, Maya) to move to Milan; Einstein remained in Munich to finish his secondary studies, meeting with his parents the following year. In the autumn of 1896 he began his higher studies at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, where he was a student of the mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who later generalized the four-dimensional formalism introduced by the theories of his former student. Between 1902 and 1909 he secured a permanent position at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland, and during this time he completed his doctorate. In that period, specifically in 1905, he published articles of great relevance to science: on the photoelectric effect, on Brownian motion and the theory of special relativity. These articles earned him his doctorate, a professorship in 1909 at the University of Bern, in 1914 a place at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin, and in 1921 the Nobel Prize in Physics, but awarded for the effect photoelectric, since the Theory of Special and General Relativity (which he perfected around 1915) raised controversy in the scientific world. During the rest of his life and, despite the fact that he had to live two world wars, during the second being the moment when he emigrated to the United States forever, he devoted himself to science trying to find a unitary theory of gravitation and electromagnetism. . Throughout his career, he obtained worldwide fame and prestige as a scientist and the equation E = m • c 2 is perhaps one of the best known in Physics. Married twice and with two recognized children, he was an active defender of pacifism, although he is also remembered for supporting (and not participating) the "Manhattan Project", a nuclear weapons development program in the United States that would lead to the atomic bomb. . But after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki disaster, he campaigned against nuclear weapons. Einstein died in Princeton in 1955, leaving a scientific legacy that revolutionized science in the twentieth century and for now, probably the twenty-first.