Probably the most famous and accomplished scientist of all time, Albert Einstein was the son of a featherbed salesman and his amateur violinist wife, and got poor marks in grade school. As a child he spoke rarely and haltingly. In 1905 he obtained his doctorate while working as a technical assistant at a patent office.

During his stay at the Patent Office, and in his spare time, he produced much of his remarkable work. In 1909 he became Professor Extraordinary at Zurich, in 1911 Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, returning to Zurich in the following year to fill a similar post. In 1914 he was appointed Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute and Professor in the University of Berlin. He remained in Berlin until 1933 when he emigrated to America to take the position of Professor of Theoretical Physics at Princeton.

At the start of his scientific work, Einstein realized the inadequacies of Newtonian mechanics and his special theory of relativity stemmed from an attempt to reconcile the laws of mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. He dealt with classical problems of statistical mechanics and problems in which they were merged with quantum theory: this led to an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules.

In his early days in Berlin, Einstein postulated that the correct interpretation of the special theory of relativity must also furnish a theory of gravitation and in 1916 he published his paper on the general theory of relativity. 

Einstein married Mileva Maric in 1903 and they had a daughter and two sons; their marriage was dissolved in 1919 and in the same year he married his cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, who died in 1936. He died on April 18, 1955 at Princeton, New Jersey.

Albert Einstein, scientist extraordinaire, is now forever In Heaven with the Stars.