Albert Einstein
1879–1955, Ulm, Germany, Princeton, USA
German-born physicist of Jewish descent who built special and general relativity, and made foundational contributions to quantum mechanics.
In 1905, his 'miracle year', Einstein published four papers that changed physics: special relativity, mass-energy equivalence (), an explanation of the photoelectric effect (which won him the 1921 Nobel Prize), and an explanation of Brownian motion. In 1915 he completed general relativity, describing gravity as the curvature of spacetime — experimentally confirmed in 1919 through observations of light bending during a solar eclipse.
Nobel-winning work
Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 (announced in 1922) 'for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect'. In his 1905 paper he proposed that light is absorbed in discrete quanta (photons) and derived the relation E = hν − W between electron energy, light frequency and work function — a cornerstone of quantum theory, experimentally confirmed by Millikan in 1916. The relativity theories were deliberately not the cited work.
Workplaces: Swiss Patent Office, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
Germany, Switzerland, United States