Albert Einstein was one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. Here, are a few things about his life you might like to know.

He was born on 14th March, 1879 in Germany to a businessman father. His mother was particularly interested in music, so Einstein  learned music from very early age. He played Beethoven’s sonatas and Mozart’s melodies beautifully on violin.

When Einstein was around four, his father gave him a magnetic compass. He tried hard to understand how the needle worked in the closed case of the compass. This was the first incident that showed Einstein’s inclination towards science and mathematics.

When Einstein was ten years old, an older friend and a medical student  introduced him to popular books on science, mathematics and philosophical writings. These included Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and Euclid’s Elements (which Einstein called the “holy little geometry book”).

At the age of seventeen, he passed the high-school exam with mostly good grades. He scored a top grade of 6 in physics and mathematical subjects, on a scale of 1-6. Though only seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at a University in Zurich, Switzerland. Einstein got Swiss citizenship at age 22.

Later  in life, Einstein came up with theories about light, matter, gravity, space, and time. He came up with “the world’s most famous equation” that is ” E = mc² “. It means that energy and mass are different forms of the same thing.

In 1921, he received the  Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”

In warring Germany, when Hitler came to power,  he began to imprison Jews. Einstein who was also a Jew  had to leave Germany in 1933.

Einstein went to the United States and lived there with the help of the Advanced Academic Research Center at Princeton in the country. Einstein was granted American citizen in 1940. On 17 April 1955, Albert Einstein died at the age of 76.

His brain was preserved by scientists because they wanted to find a reason for his unmatched  intellect. His brain is remarkably different from most people and could be related to his genius.

References

Albert Einstein – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. (n.d.). Via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein