EINSTEIN, ALBERT (1879— ), German-Swiss physi cist, was born of Jewish parents at Ulm, Wurttemberg, Mch. 14, 1879. His boyhood was spent at Munich where his father, who owned electro-technical works, had settled. The family migrated to Italy in 1894, whilst Albert Einstein went 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 190o and finally, after a year as tutor at Schaffhausen, was appointed examiner of patents at the patent office at Berne, where, having become a Swiss citizen, he remained until 1909. It was during this period that he took his Ph.D. degree at the University of Zurich and published his first papers on physical subjects. These were so highly thought of that in 1909 he was appointed extraordinary professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. In 1911 he accepted the chair of physics in Prague, only to be induced to return to his own polytechnic school at ZUrich as full professor in the following year. In 1913 his pre-eminence had become so evident that a special position was created for him in Berlin, director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Physical Institute. He was elected a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and given a stipend suf ficient to enable him to devote all his time to research without any restrictions or routine duties. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1921, having also been made previously a member of the Amsterdam and Copenhagen Acade mies, 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 recogni tion of his theory of relativity. He received a Nobel Prize in 1921.
Einstein's work is so important and has proved fertile in so many various branches of physics that it is not possible to do more than enumerate a few of the most salient papers. The work by which he is best known, the theory of relativity, was begun in 1905 with the publication of the restricted principle with its consequences (see RELATIVITY ; SPACE-TIME). Though considered fantastic by many, it had secured fairly general accept ance in Germany in 1912. The restricted theory was followed by the generalized theory in 1915. But Einstein's work has been by no means confined to such abstract questions. One of his earliest publications gave the complete theory and formulae of the phe nomenon known as Brownian motion, which had puzzled physicists for nearly 8o years. Sooner, probably, than anybody else he realized the far-reaching implications of the theory propounded by Planck, and Einstein spent much of his time on the problems which could be explained by the quantum theory. A series of papers in 1905, 1906, 1909 and 1911 developed his "light-quan tum" hypothesis which assumes that radiation when propagated has a "quantum-like" structure. In dealing with the transforma tion of these light quanta Einstein developed his Law of the Photo electric effect. His paper on the variation of the specific heat with temperature, which appeared in 1907, was the first extension of Planck's fundamental hypothesis, and its verification in essen tials is one of the most convincing arguments in its favour. In 1917 Einstein published a paper in which he deduced the Law of Radiation using the generalized Bohr atom instead of Planck's linear oscillator. Numerous other papers have appeared in the Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Science, the Physikalisclie Zeitschri f t, the Proceedings of the German Physical Society, the Annalen der Physik, and elsewhere.
Einstein was attracted to England and to America in the early thirties, and while absent the Hitler regime deprived him of his post as Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut fur Physik and of his Berlin professorship. In 1933 he became Professor of Mathe matics at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, N. J.