Einstein supported the Allies but generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommending that the US begin similar research. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Horrified by the Nazi ' war of extermination' against his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. In 1933, while he was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. In 1917, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics he also became a German citizen again, this time as a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia.

In 1914, he moved to Berlin in order to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1901, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss Federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900. īorn in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time. His work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics 'for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect', a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc 2, which arises from relativity theory, has been called 'the world's most famous equation'.

Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics, and was thus a central figure in the revolutionary reshaping of the scientific understanding of nature that modern physics accomplished in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Brandeis University (director, 1946–1947)Įine neue Bestimmung der Moleküldimensionen (A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions) (1905)Īlbert Einstein ( / ˈ aɪ n s t aɪ n/ EYEN-styne German: ⓘ 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held to be one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time.

University of Oxford (visits, 1931–1933).

California Institute of Technology (visits, 1931–1933).

Institute for Advanced Study (1933–1955).

German Physical Society (president, 1916–1918).

Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (director, 1917–1933).

Humboldt University of Berlin (1914–1933).

Prussian Academy of Sciences (1914–1933).

Charles University in Prague (1911–1912).

Albert einstein atomic theory