98 Fun Facts About Albert Einstein

In which city was Albert Einstein born?

Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, was Albert Einstein's birthplace; the family moved to Munich the following year, where his father and uncle founded an electrical engineering firm.

In what year was physicist Albert Einstein born?

1879: Albert Einstein was born on 14 March of that year, the first child of Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch; his sister Maja followed in 1881.

In what year was Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics?

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, though it was formally presented to him in 1922.

Taking a chair in Prague in 1911 required Einstein to accept citizenship of which empire?

Austro-Hungarian: the 1911 professorship at Prague's German university was an imperial state post, so Einstein took Austrian citizenship, which he held until returning to Zurich in 1912.

Which equation of Albert Einstein's says mass and energy are two forms of the same thing?

E=mc² came out of special relativity in 1905: energy equals mass times the speed of light squared, so a tiny mass holds enormous energy because c² is so large.

In which year did Albert Einstein's four 'Annus Mirabilis' papers appear?

The four papers included Brownian motion, special relativity and mass–energy equivalence, a burst often compared with Isaac Newton's own miracle year of 1666.

Which country's citizenship did Einstein renounce at 16, leaving him stateless for a time?

Germany: with his father's consent Einstein gave up his Württemberg citizenship in January 1896 and remained stateless until he became a Swiss citizen in February 1901.

In which city did Albert Einstein take his first academic teaching post, as a Privatdozent in 1908?

Bern: in 1908 Einstein became a Privatdozent at the University of Bern, lecturing while still holding his day job there; in 1909 the University of Zurich made him an associate professor.

Which best describes Albert Einstein's attitude to his early schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium?

He resented the drill: Einstein later wrote that the school's strict rote learning harmed creativity, and at the end of 1894 a doctor's letter got him released to join his family in Italy.

Einstein's 'miracle year' papers covered special relativity, Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence and what else?

The photoelectric effect paper, which explained light as discrete quanta, was the fourth miracle-year paper alongside special relativity, Brownian motion and mass–energy equivalence; general relativity only followed a decade later.

Unable to find a teaching job, Einstein became an assistant examiner in 1902 at what institution?

The Swiss Patent Office hired him in June 1902 as an assistant examiner; assessing electromagnetic patent applications is often said to have fed his thinking on relativity.

What ironic name did Einstein, Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine give their Bern discussion club?

The Olympia Academy was their mock-grand name for evening readings of Hume, Mach and Poincaré over cheap suppers in Bern from 1902; Einstein was its 'president'.

Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić, was of which ethnicity?

Serbian: Marić was born in 1875 to a Serbian family in Titel, Vojvodina, then part of Austria-Hungary, and was the only woman in Einstein's 1896 physics class in Zurich.

As part of his 1919 divorce settlement, Einstein promised Mileva Marić what?

Any future Nobel Prize money was pledged to Mileva in the 1919 settlement; when the prize came, the funds bought her three apartment houses in Zurich, the income supporting her and their sons.

Einstein's second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, was related to him how?

She was his first cousin on his mother's side and second cousin on his father's; they married in 1919.

Whose observations of the 29 May 1919 solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that gravity bends light?

Arthur Eddington led the Principe expedition; his plates showed starlight near the Sun deflected by roughly the 1.75 arcseconds general relativity predicted, twice the Newtonian figure, and the result made Einstein world-famous.

In 1933 Einstein took up a post he held until his death at which institution in Princeton, New Jersey?

The Institute for Advanced Study, founded in 1930 with Abraham Flexner as director, made Einstein one of its first professors in 1933; he kept the post until his death in 1955.

In 1952 Einstein was offered, and declined, which largely ceremonial office?

President of Israel: after Chaim Weizmann died in November 1952, Ben-Gurion's government offered Einstein the presidency; he declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people.

Einstein died in April 1955 from internal bleeding caused by what?

A ruptured aortic aneurysm, reinforced with cellophane by a surgeon in 1948, gave way in April 1955; Einstein refused further surgery and died at Princeton Hospital on 18 April.

Which pathologist removed Einstein's brain during the autopsy, without his family's permission?

Thomas Stoltz Harvey, the Princeton Hospital pathologist, took the brain during the 1955 autopsy hoping future neuroscience could explain Einstein's intelligence; it was cut into some 240 blocks and studied for decades.

Einstein's four 'miracle year' papers were all published in which German journal?

Annalen der Physik, the leading German physics journal, then edited by Paul Drude, printed all four papers; Einstein also wrote abstracts for its review supplement, the Beiblätter, from 1905.

Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion compelled physicists to accept the existence of what?

Atoms: Einstein showed the jiggling of pollen-sized particles followed from bombardment by invisible molecules, and Jean Perrin's 1908 measurements matched his formula, ending serious doubt that atoms exist.

Special relativity reinterpreted the transformations named after which Dutch physicist?

Hendrik Lorentz had derived the Lorentz transformations by 1904 to explain the Michelson–Morley result; Einstein's special relativity derived them from two postulates, the relativity principle and the constancy of the speed of light.

Which physicist first observed the photoelectric effect in 1887?

Heinrich Hertz noticed in 1887 that ultraviolet light made sparks jump more easily between electrodes; Lenard later showed the emitted electrons' energy depended on frequency, the puzzle Einstein's light-quanta solved.

Einstein signed the famous August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, but which Hungarian physicist actually wrote it?

Leo Szilard wrote it and Einstein signed on August 2, 1939; Einstein later told Linus Pauling that signing was the one great mistake of his life.

How much did Einstein's brain weigh when the pathologist removed it in 1955?

1,230 grams, well under the roughly 1,400-gram adult average; the brain was dissected into about 240 blocks, and journalist Steven Levy tracked it down in the pathologist's possession in 1978.

With which Indian physicist did Einstein develop a form of quantum statistics bearing both their names?

Bose derived the Planck spectrum in 1924; particles that obey the statistics are now called bosons.

Which magazine named Einstein its Person of the Century in 1999?

Time made the choice in 1999; Einstein had become perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist after the 1919 eclipse results.

Objecting to the fundamental randomness of quantum theory, Einstein famously declared what?

'God does not play dice' was his objection to randomness at the root of physics; he spent his later years trying to fold electromagnetism into a unified field theory.

On arriving in Antwerp in March 1933, what did Einstein do at the German consulate?

Surrendered his passport: on 28 March 1933 Einstein handed in his German passport at the Antwerp consulate and renounced his citizenship, then spent months in De Haan before leaving for the United States.

Why did the 16-year-old Einstein renounce his Württemberg citizenship in January 1896?

He did it with his father's approval; when he later became Swiss, the authorities deemed him medically unfit to serve anyway.

In 1917 Einstein became director of which Berlin research body?

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics was founded in 1917 with Einstein as its first director, a post he held until 1933; Planck and Nernst had lured him to Berlin in 1914 with a chair free of teaching.

Which composer's violin sonatas converted the 13-year-old Einstein into a willing music student?

Mozart: at 13 Einstein discovered Mozart's violin sonatas and, by his own account, began practising willingly; he remained a lifelong amateur violinist, playing chamber music into old age.

Einstein was a figurehead in establishing which institution, opened in 1925, which later received his papers and literary estate?

Chaim Weizmann asked him in 1921 to help raise funds for The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which opened in 1925.

Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, which gave Einstein an honorary degree in 1946, is what kind of institution?

A historically black college: Lincoln, founded in 1854, was the first degree-granting HBCU; Einstein spoke there against racism as 'a disease of white people' when he accepted the degree in May 1946.

In 1955 Einstein joined which British philosopher in signing a manifesto on the dangers of nuclear weapons?

Bertrand Russell drafted the Russell–Einstein Manifesto warning that nuclear war could end humanity; Einstein signed it on 11 April 1955, days before his death, and Russell released it in London that July.

Einstein said he had sympathy for the impersonal, pantheistic God described by which philosopher?

Baruch Spinoza: asked by Rabbi Herbert Goldstein in 1929 whether he believed in God, Einstein cabled that he believed in Spinoza's God, revealed in the harmony of all that exists.

Which document did Einstein sign in 1914 instead of the pro-war declaration of ninety-three intellectuals?

The Manifesto to the Europeans, drafted by Georg Friedrich Nicolai in October 1914, called for a united Europe and drew only four signatures, Einstein's among them, against the ninety-three names on 'To the Civilized World'.

In which Swiss town did Einstein finish secondary school in 1896, lodging with the Winteler family?

Aarau: Einstein spent 1895–96 at the cantonal school there, boarding with teacher Jost Winteler's family, whose daughter Marie became his first love; he passed the Matura in September 1896.

Einstein's younger son Eduard was diagnosed with which illness at about age twenty?

Schizophrenia: Eduard, born 1910, had a breakdown around 1930 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia; after his mother Mileva died in 1948 he lived permanently at the Burghölzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich.

Sick in bed at five, Albert Einstein got what gift from his father, sparking his lifelong fascination with physics?

A compass: the needle's invisible pull convinced the boy that 'something deeply hidden had to be behind things', and fixed his fascination with electromagnetism.

The Munich firm founded by Einstein's father and uncle built electrical equipment based on what?

Direct current: Einstein & Cie made DC dynamos and lighting equipment, lost an 1894 bid to light Munich because it lacked the capital to switch to AC, and the family moved to Italy.

In which Italian city did the Einstein family settle in the Palazzo Cornazzani?

Pavia: the family moved there from Milan to run the new Einstein & Cie works, taking rooms in the Palazzo Cornazzani; Albert joined them after quitting his Munich gymnasium with a doctor's note.

Before turning thirteen, Einstein worked out an original proof of which famous result?

The Pythagorean theorem: at twelve, after his uncle Jakob told him the result, Einstein found his own proof based on the similarity of triangles; he later called the geometry book that followed his 'holy geometry booklet'.

Which philosopher did Einstein read at thirteen, making him a favourite for a time?

Immanuel Kant: the medical student Max Talmud, who dined weekly with the Einsteins, introduced the thirteen-year-old to the Critique of Pure Reason, and Kant became his favourite philosopher for a time.

At sixteen, Einstein failed the general part of the entrance exam to which school?

The Zurich Polytechnic (now ETH): in 1895 he passed its maths and physics sections but failed the general part, enrolled a year later after finishing school in Switzerland, and graduated in 1900 with a teaching diploma.

Einstein's first published paper, in 1901, addressed which phenomenon?

Capillarity: 'Conclusions Drawn from the Phenomena of Capillarity' appeared in 1901, proposing a model of intermolecular attraction that Einstein later dismissed as one of his worthless beginner's works.

Patent applications on Einstein's desk included an electric typewriter and what sorting device?

His bosses made the job permanent in 1903 but withheld promotion until he had "fully mastered machine technology."

In 1906 the patent office promoted Einstein to which grade?

Technical Examiner Second Class: the April 1906 promotion, with a rise in pay, came after he had published the miracle-year papers while still a third-class examiner; he left for Zurich in 1909.

Which relative found the letters revealing that Einstein had a daughter, Lieserl?

His granddaughter Evelyn, Hans Albert's adopted daughter, came across the Einstein–Marić love letters in 1986; they revealed Lieserl, born in early 1902, a year before the couple married, whose fate after 1903 is unrecorded.

What was the title of Einstein's 1905 paper that introduced special relativity?

'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies', received by the journal in June 1905, built relativity on two postulates and declared the luminiferous aether, a leading idea of the day, superfluous.

Who reinterpreted special relativity in 1908 as a geometric theory of spacetime?

Hermann Minkowski, once Einstein's maths teacher in Zurich, recast special relativity as four-dimensional spacetime in a 1908 Cologne lecture; Einstein, at first dismissive, adopted the formalism on the road to general relativity.

Einstein's 1907 idea that a freely falling observer cannot detect gravity is called what?

The equivalence principle, Einstein's 'happiest thought' of 1907, holds that free fall is locally indistinguishable from the absence of gravity; the same review article predicted gravitational redshift and the bending of light.

Which British paper ran the 1919 headline "Revolution in Science – Newtonian Ideas Overthrown"?

The Times of London ran the headline on 7 November 1919, the day after the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society heard the eclipse results; the coverage made Einstein a global celebrity overnight.

In which Asian country did Einstein spend six weeks lecturing in late 1922?

Japan: Einstein arrived at Kobe in November 1922, having learned of his Nobel Prize en route, and spent six weeks lecturing to huge crowds; the same tour took in Singapore, Ceylon and Mandatory Palestine.

Which philosopher debated relativity with Einstein in Paris in April 1922?

Henri Bergson challenged Einstein at the Société française de philosophie on 6 April 1922, arguing that lived time differs from the physicist's time; the clash became a lasting cause célèbre in the humanities.

Which film star made Einstein his special guest at the 1931 Hollywood premiere of City Lights?

Chaplin told him: "They cheer me because they understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you."

Einstein's friendship with which Caltech president was called "awkward" over the man's militarism?

Robert Millikan, Caltech's head, hosted Einstein's winter visits of 1931–33; the friendship was awkward because Millikan favoured patriotic militarism while Einstein was a pacifist, though Millikan's 1916 measurements had confirmed Einstein's photoelectric equation.

Which architect designed Einstein's wooden summer house at Caputh in 1929?

Konrad Wachsmann, then a young architect at the Christoph & Unmack timber firm, designed the prefabricated wooden house at Caputh; Einstein, a non-swimmer, sailed the Templiner See there until leaving Germany in 1932.

In 1933 Einstein hid in a wooden cabin on Roughton Heath in which English county?

Norfolk: Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson put him up in a hut on Roughton Heath near Cromer in September 1933, with two shotgun-carrying bodyguards, a scene photographed for the Daily Herald.

With which logician did Einstein take long walks at the Institute for Advanced Study?

Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician famous for his incompleteness theorems, walked home daily with Einstein in Princeton; Einstein said he went to the Institute 'just to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel'.

In what year did Einstein become a United States citizen?

1940: Einstein took the oath of US citizenship on 1 October 1940, alongside his stepdaughter Margot, while keeping the Swiss citizenship he had held since 1901.

Which Black contralto stayed at Einstein's home in 1937 after a Princeton inn refused her a room?

Marian Anderson, refused a room at the Nassau Inn before her 1937 Princeton concert, stayed with Einstein instead and on every return visit, the last in January 1955, two months before he died.

Einstein offered to be a character witness at the 1951 trial of which civil-rights activist?

Du Bois had been charged as an alleged foreign agent; Einstein called racism America's "worst disease."

How long was the FBI's secret dossier on Einstein by the time he died?

1,427 pages: the FBI file, opened in 1932 after a women's patriotic group urged that he be barred from the country, tracked his pacifism and civil-rights work until his death in 1955.

Whom did Einstein describe as "a role model for the generations to come"?

The two exchanged letters in 1931 through Gandhi's envoy but never managed to meet.

Einstein's 1954 letter calling the Bible "pretty childish" legends was written to which philosopher?

Eric Gutkind, author of 'Choose Life', received the letter written on 3 January 1954; it called the word God 'the product of human weaknesses', and the letter sold at auction for $2.9 million in 2018.

Which surgeon had reinforced Einstein's abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1948?

Rudolph Nissen, the surgeon who later gave his name to the Nissen fundoplication, wrapped the aneurysm in cellophane in 1948; in 1955 Einstein refused a second operation: 'I have done my share.'

In which New Jersey city were Einstein's remains cremated?

Trenton: the body was cremated at the Ewing Crematorium there on 18 April 1955, the day he died, and the ashes were scattered at an undisclosed spot; only the brain and eyes had been removed beforehand.

To whom did the autopsy pathologist give Einstein's eyes?

The brain itself was cut into about 240 blocks and encased in collodion.

Which detector observed gravitational waves in 2015, a century after Einstein predicted them?

LIGO's twin detectors in Louisiana and Washington recorded the first signal, from two merging black holes, on 14 September 2015; the Hulse–Taylor binary pulsar had shown the waves' energy loss indirectly in the 1970s.

Which term did Einstein add to his field equations in 1917 to force a static universe?

The cosmological constant, Λ, was inserted in 1917 to balance gravity and hold the universe static; Einstein abandoned it after Hubble's 1929 evidence of receding galaxies, and the 'biggest blunder' remark is known only from Gamow.

Who coined the word "photon" in 1926 for the light quanta Einstein proposed?

Gilbert N. Lewis, the Berkeley chemist, proposed 'photon' in a 1926 letter to Nature, though with a different meaning in mind; the name stuck after Compton scattering had convinced sceptics like Bohr that light quanta were real.

Einstein's 1917 paper on stimulated emission laid the groundwork for which device?

Stimulated emission is the physical process behind the maser and the laser; the paper was the first to show that atomic transitions obey simple statistical laws.

The first Bose–Einstein condensate, made in 1995, used a gas of which element's atoms?

Rubidium: Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman cooled rubidium-87 atoms to about 170 nanokelvin at JILA in June 1995; Ketterle's sodium condensate followed months later, and the three shared the 2001 Nobel Prize.

What household appliance did Einstein and a former student patent in the US in 1930?

A news report of a Berlin family killed by a leaking fridge seal inspired a design with no moving parts.

Besides water and ammonia, which gas was the third working fluid in Einstein's absorption fridge?

Butane was the refrigerant: it evaporated into an ammonia atmosphere, and water absorbed the ammonia, so the cycle needed no moving parts; the arrival of non-toxic Freon in 1930 removed the design's reason for being.

Einsteinium was first identified in the fallout of which nuclear test?

Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen-bomb test, at Enewetak on 1 November 1952, produced einsteinium-253 in its debris; about 200 atoms were recovered from filter papers flown through the cloud.

What is the atomic number of einsteinium?

99: einsteinium lies between californium (98) and fermium (100); in 1955 bombarding an einsteinium-253 target with alpha particles produced the first 17 atoms of mendelevium, element 101.

Who sculpted the 1979 Albert Einstein Memorial outside the National Academy of Sciences?

Berks worked from a bust he modelled from life at Einstein's home in 1953; the dais maps the sky at the dedication moment.

What single word did Einstein whisper as his verdict on the Einstein Tower in Potsdam?

'Organic' was his one-word verdict, whispered to architect Erich Mendelsohn after touring the expressionist solar observatory, which opened in 1924 to search for the gravitational redshift predicted by relativity.

Which photographer caught Einstein sticking out his tongue on his birthday in 1951?

Arthur Sasse of the International News Service snapped it as Einstein left his birthday party at Princeton on 14 March 1951; Einstein liked it so much he ordered nine prints for himself.

Geoffrey Rush played the older Einstein in which 2017 National Geographic series?

The season was adapted from Walter Isaacson's biography Einstein: His Life and Universe.

In which 2023 film was Einstein portrayed by Tom Conti?

Oppenheimer: Christopher Nolan's 2023 film has Tom Conti's Einstein meet Cillian Murphy's Oppenheimer by a Princeton pond; Andy Serkis and Walter Matthau are among others who have played him on screen.

Walter Matthau played Einstein as a matchmaking uncle in which 1994 romantic comedy?

I.Q., directed by Fred Schepisi, has Matthau's Einstein and his physicist cronies scheme to pair his niece Catherine (Meg Ryan) with a garage mechanic played by Tim Robbins.

Philip Glass's 1976 opera about Einstein is titled Einstein on the what?

Beach: Einstein on the Beach, created with Robert Wilson, premiered at the Avignon Festival in July 1976; it runs about five hours without intermission, so the audience may come and go.

Einstein's 1938 popular science book The Evolution of Physics was co-written with whom?

Einstein agreed partly to help the cash-strapped Infeld; it earned a Time cover story.

Who was Einstein's secretary from 1928, later a trustee of his literary estate?

Helen Dukas, hired in April 1928 when Einstein was ill, guarded his papers for the rest of his life and, with Otto Nathan, became a trustee of his estate; she stayed in the Princeton house until her death in 1982.

Einstein's friend Michele Besso, thanked in the 1905 relativity paper, died how long before him?

About one month: Besso died in Geneva on 15 March 1955, thirty-four days before Einstein; Einstein's condolence letter to the family called the distinction between past, present and future 'a stubbornly persistent illusion'.

How many of the 29 attendees at the 1927 Solvay Conference were or became Nobel laureates?

17 of the 29 at the fifth Solvay Conference in Brussels were or became Nobel laureates, Marie Curie among them, the only one with two; Einstein and Bohr led its famous quantum debates.

What profession did Einstein's elder son Hans Albert follow?

A hydraulic engineer: Hans Albert Einstein, born in 1904, studied at ETH Zurich, emigrated in 1938 and became professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, known for sediment transport work.

Which instrument did Einstein's mother Pauline play well?

The piano: Pauline Koch Einstein was an accomplished pianist who started Albert on violin lessons as a small boy; mother and son later played sonatas together, his violin to her piano.

In which year did the Royal Society award Einstein its Copley Medal?

1925: the Royal Society gave Einstein the Copley Medal, its oldest award, for his theory of relativity and contributions to quantum theory; he had been a Foreign Member of the Society since 1921.

What diet did Einstein adopt only in the last part of his life?

Vegetarian: Einstein gave up meat only around 1954, writing that year that 'man was not born to be a carnivore', though he had praised vegetarianism's effect on temperament decades earlier.

On Lev Landau's logarithmic scale of physicists, where 0 was Newton, what score did Einstein get?

0.5: on Landau's logarithmic ranking, Newton alone scored 0 and Einstein 0.5, with Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Dirac at 1; Landau put himself at 2.5, later promoting himself to 2.

Einstein's last signed manifesto spawned conferences first held in which Canadian village?

Einstein signed it days before his death; the first Pugwash Conference met in July 1957.

Which professor approved Einstein's doctoral dissertation in 1905?

Kleiner's admiration for a 1909 Einstein lecture later helped create his first professorship.

Which year did physicists worldwide celebrate as the "World Year of Physics", or Einstein Year?

2005 was chosen as the World Year of Physics to mark the centenary of Einstein's miracle year; the UN General Assembly also declared it the International Year of Physics.