Born: March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany.
Died: April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
In 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich, Germany. He studied mathematics, in particular calculus. In 1895 Einstein failed an exam, which would have allowed him to become an electrical engineer at the EidgenÖssische Technische Hochschole in Zurich. Upon the failing of the entrance exam to the ETH, Einstein attended a secondary school at Aarau planning to use this route to enter the ETH in Zurich. By 1901 he had a temporary job teaching mathematics at a Technical High School in Winterthur. In 1905, Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zurich for his thesis On a new determination of molecular dimensions. .
In the first of three pages, all written in 1905, Einstein examined the discovery of Max Planck, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities. The energy of these quanta was directly proportional to the frequency of the radiation. Einstein used Planck's quantum hypothesis to describe the electromagnetic radiation of light.
Einstein's second paper proposed what is today called the Special Theory of Relativity. He based his theory on a reinterpretation of the original principle of relativity; namely the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second basic hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference.
Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein wasn't the first to propose all the components of the Special Theory of Relativity. His contribution helped unify important parts of the classical mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics. .
For Einstein's third paper, he examined statistical mechanics, a field that has been studied by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs.