Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm in what is now West Germany. His father was a manufacturer of electrical equipment. Business failure led his father to move Einstein's family first to Munich and later to Milan. There were no early indications of Einstein's intellectual capabilities; in fact, there was even some concern on the part of his parents when he was a small child that he might be somewhat backward. During his school years he showed no special aptitude because of his dislike for rigid methods of instruction, and he was cited by school officials as being disruptive. Einstein was fascinated by mathematics and science, subjects that he studied on his own. He became a high-school dropout when he left school to join his family in Milan. Einstein had his German citizenship revoked in 1896 and became a Swiss citizen in 1901. He died as a naturalized citizen of the United States on April 18, 1955, in Princeton, New Jersey.

At an early age Einstein revealed an independence of mind that was to become characteristic of his entire future life. On a visit to Milan Einstein announced to his father three final decisions: he would quit school; he would abandon the Jewish community, and he would drop his German nationality. The school did not provide him with a proper education, the Jewish community was to narrow minded, and Germany was too chauvinistic. Einstein assumed that a small nation like Switzerland would be devoid of super power ambitions and he eventually aquired Swiss citizenship

Einstein entered the Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland, where he earned a doctorate in physics in 1905. The same year he published four research papers. Each contained a great discovery : the theory of Brownian motion; the equivalence of mass and energy; the photon theory of light; and the special theory of relativity. In the Special Theory of Relativity he extended to optical phenomena the concept of relativity, while maintaining under all circumstances the constancy of the velocity of light, from which follows that no material body can move as fast as light.In 1915 Einstein proposed the General Theory of Relativity as an extension of the Special Theory. Its basis was the identification of gravity with inertia. His work provided the theoretical expectation that vast amounts of energy could be released from the nucleus.

In 1919 a prediction of Einstein's General Relativity was verified, and in a few years it became the basis of new cosmologies. Einstein was awarded the Nobel prize for Physics in 1921. Although a committed pacifist Einstein began to warn against the dangers of fascism as the Nazis denounced his work as Jewish science. In 1933 he left Germany and took up residence at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey, where he pursued his research toward unifying the laws of physics.
Einstein's last years were spent searching for a unified field theory, for a universal force that would link gravitation with electromagnetic and subatomic forces, a problem on which no one to date has been entirely successful.
Einstein was filled with reverence for the works of nature, and he noted that "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." He thought of himself more as philosopher than as scientist, and in many ways he was from the same mold as the Greek natural philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, in trying to understand the natural world through mental concepts instead of experimentation. His success did draw on the insights of predecessors and the powerful analytical tools of mathematics, but most of all it was the result of an unerring cosmic intuition, the likes of which have been equaled by very few.