Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879 to Hermann and Pauline Einstein.  His family moved to Munich when he was young.  Einstein always loved mathematics and science.  Everything else however seemed to bore him.  The Einstein family business of manufacturing electrical parts failed, and the Einsteins moved to Milan, Italy, in 1894.  Albert Einstein stayed behind to finish school. 

            Einstein tried to skip high school by taking an exam for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.  He failed the arts portion of the exam, and was not accepted to the school.  His family sent him to Aarau, a nearby city, where he was schooled at the cantonal secondary school.  He returned to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in 1896.  He graduated in 1900 as a secondary school teacher of Mathematics and Physics.  

            In 1901 Einstein and Mileva, his girlfriend from college, met for a tryst.   She became pregnant and the two separated.   The baby was put up for adoption.  He married Mileva in 1903 and had a son, Hans Albert.

Until 1902 Einstein was jobless.  He found work at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern where he was the Technical Expert Third Class.  He worked there until 1909.  While there he wrote papers in his spare time.  One paper got published in Annalen der Physik, a highly respected scientific magazine.  Another paper he wrote in 1905 he sent to the University of Zurich and got his Ph.D.  In 1908 he wrote a paper to the University of Bern and became a lecturer there. 

Einstein did not agree with the Newtonian laws of physics.  Einstein argued against the “Old Physics.”  In a time where everyone said and believed that space and time were absolute and the speed of light is relative, Einstein went the opposite direction.  He said that space and time are relative and the speed of light is absolute.  He was right.   On June 30, 1905, Einstein wrote On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.  This was also published in Annalen der Physik (This may have been the same paper he received his Ph.D. for, but not the same paper he had published in Annalen der Physik earlier).  This paper was later referred to as Special Relativity.  He later applied this theory to energy and mass to get the famous equation E=mc².  With this paper Einstein rewrote the basic laws of physics.  He was expecting large controversy, but found little.  The leading physicist Max Planck wrote Einstein a letter asking him to clarify his work.  Einstein was very excited at this.

In 1909 Einstein became Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich.  His new professorship may have been the cause of him leaving the Swiss Patent Office.  In 1910 his son Eduard was born.

Einstein held professorships at the University of Prague and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in rapid succession.  In 1914 Einstein received the most prestigious and best paying job a theoretical physicist could hold- professorship at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft in Berlin.  It was in 1914 that Einstein divorced Mileva. 

World War One had begun, which was big trouble for most German physicists.  After the war, German physicists were not allowed to participate in meetings of the other physicists.  Einstein, however, was permitted to join.  He may have been permitted to join because he did not have a German citizenship but rather a Swiss one, or because he was so great in math and physics. 

Einstein was known not only for his breakthroughs in science, but for his personality and views.  His pacifist and Zionist views stirred up some controversy.  In 1915 Special Relativity was starting to fail so Einstein wrote General Relativity.   General Relativity and the controversy already around him caused difficulties.  One difficulty was when he received his Nobel Prize in 1921, it was said to be for his work in 1905 for the Photoelectric Effect, not for relativity. 

In 1917 Einstein fell sick and nearly died.  His cousin Elsa nursed him back to health.  In 1919 he married Elsa.  On May 29, 1919 a solar eclipse proved General Relativity works.

The controversy of General Relativity died down for several reasons.  The biggest reason would be that in the 20s and 30s technology had come along far enough to prove relativity true.  Also, Einstein had started to dwindle out of the light of physics in Europe.  When Einstein was trying to get his Unified Field Theory, other scientists were working on quantum mechanics.  Such scientists would be Bohr, Heisenburg, and Max Planck.  The threat of World War Two and the Atomic Bomb were another reason.  

In 1933 Einstein and Elsa moved to the United States due to the rise in Fascism.  When he moved to America he gave up pacifism and reluctantly decided the best way to deal with war was through violence.  In 1936 Elsa died after a short illness.  On August 2, 1939 Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  In the letter Einstein told FDR how serious the threat of an Atomic Bomb is.  FDR took him seriously.  This started a chain of letters between FDR and Einstein.  Einstein’s letter convinced FDR to fund what later became the Manhattan Project. In 1940 Einstein became a citizen of the United States.  His first wife, Mileva, died in 1949. 

In 1938-9, at the age of 59, Einstein, with the help of Leonard Infeld and Banesh Hoffmann, made major breakthroughs in the Theory of General Relativity.  Until his last days, Einstein was always trying to get his Unified Field Theory (Grand Unified Theory) to work out.  Unified Field Theory dealt with the phenomena of gravitation and electromagnetism being derived from one set of equations.  No one really paid attention to Einstein’s later thoughts.  Einstein died from heart failure on April 18, 1955. 

Today physicists are trying to combine quantum mechanics with Einstein’s relativity in a Theory of Everything, but it still eludes them.