lbert Einstein was born at Ulm, Wuerttemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His boyhood was spent in Munich, where his father, who owned electro-technical works, had settled. The family migrated to Italy in 1894, and Albert was sent to a cantonal school at Aarau in Switzerland. He attended lectures while supporting himself by teaching mathematics and physics at the Polytechnic School at Zurich until 1900. Finally, after a year as tutor at Schaffthausen, he was appointed examiner of patents at the Patent Office at Bern where, having become a Swiss citizen, he remained until 1909. It was in this period that he obtained his Ph.D. degree at the University of Zurich and published his first papers on physical subjects. These were so highly esteemed that in 1909 he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Zurich. In 1911 he accepted the Chair of Physics at Prague, only to be induced to return to his own Polytechnic School at Zurich as full professor the next year. In 1913 a special position was created for him in Berlin as director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute. He was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and received a stipend sufficient to enable him to devote all his time to research without any restrictions or routine duties. Elected to Royal Society He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1921, having also been made previously a member of the Amsterdam and Copenhagen Academies, while the Universities of Geneva, Manchester, Rostock and Princeton conferred honorary degrees on him. In 1925 he received the Copley Medal of the Royal Society and in 1926 the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in recognition of his theory of relativity. He received a Nobel Price in 1921. Honors continued to be conferred on him. He was made a member of the Institute de France, one of the few foreigners ever to achieve such a distinction. Other great universities throughout the world, including Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Madrid, Buenos Aires, Zurich, Yeshiva, Harvard, London and Brussels, awarded honorary doctorates to him. One of the highest American scientific honors, the Franklin Institute Medal, came to him in 1935, when he startled the scientific world by failing to deliver more than a mere thank-you in lieu of the scientific address customary on such occasions. He made up for it later by contributing an important paper to the Journal of the Franklin Institute dealing with ideas, he explained, that were not quite ripe at the time he received the medal. Dr. Einstein married Mileva Marec, a fellow-student in Switzerland, in 1901. They had two sons, Albert Einstein Jr., an electrical engineer who also came to this country, and Eduard. The marriage ended in divorce. He married again, in 1917, this time his cousin, Elsa Einstein, a widow with two daughters. She died in Princeton in 1936. To Institute at Princeton in 32 When the Institute for Advanced Study was organized in 1932 Dr. Einstein was offered and accepted, the place of Professor of Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and served, also, as the Head of the Mathematics Department. The institute was situated at Princeton, N.J., and Dr. Einstein made plans to live there about half of each year. These plans were changed suddenly. Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany and essential human liberty, even for Jews with world reputations like Dr. Einstein, became impossible in Germany. He announced that he would not return to Berlin, sailed for Europe and went to Belgium. Immediately many nations invited him to make his home in their lands. In the late spring of 1933 Dr. Einstein learned, in Belgium, that his two step-daughters had been forced to flee Germany. Not long after that he was notified through the press that he had been ousted from the supervising board of the German Bureau of Standards. His home at Caputh was sacked by Hitler Brown Shirts on the allegation that the world-renowned physic
Posted on: Sun, 03 Aug 2014 12:40:22 +0000
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