A Truly Beautiful Mind

A desk drawer full of ideas...

1.  Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in the German city of Ulm, without any indication that he was destined for greatness. On the contrary, his mother thought Albert was a freak . To her, his head seemed much too large.

2.  At the age of two-and-a-half ,Einstein still wasn't talking. When he finally did learn to speak, he uttered everything twice. Einstein did not know what to do with other children, and his playmates called him "Brother Boring''. So the youngster played by himself much of the time. He especially loved mechanical toys. Looking at his newborn sister, Maja, he is said to have said "Fine ,but where are her wheels?"

3.  A headmaster once told his father that what Einstein chose as a profession wouldn't matter, because "he'll never make a success at anything." Einstein began learning to play the violin at the age of six, because his mother wanted him to; he later became a gifted amateur violinist, maintaining this skill throughout his life.

4. But Albert Einstein was not a bad pupil. He went to high school in Munich, where Einstein's family had moved when he was 15 months old, and scored good marks in almost every subject. Einstein hated the school's regimentation, and often clashed with his teachers. At the age of 15, Einstein felt so stifled there that he left the school for good.

5. The previous year, Albert's parents had moved to Milan, and left their son with relatives. After prolonged discussion, Einstein got his wish to continue his education in German-speaking Switzerland, in a city which was more liberal than Munich.

6. Einstein was highly gifted in maths and interested in physics, and after finishing school, he decided to study at a university in Zurich. But science wasn't the only thing that appealed to the dashing young man with the walrus moustache.

7. He also felt a special interest in a fellow student, Mileva Maric, whom he found to be a "clever creature". This young Serb had come to Switzerland because the university in Zurich was one of the few in Europe where women could get degrees. Einstein saw in her an ally against the "philistines" — those people in his family and at a university with whom he was constantly at odds. The couple fell in love. Letters survive in which they put their affection into words, mixing science with tenderness.
Wrote Einstein " how proud and happy I shall be when we both have brought our work on relativity to a victorious conclusion."

8. In 1900, at the age of 21, Albert Einstein was a university graduate and unemployed. He worked as a teaching assistant, gave private lessons and finally secured a job in 1902 as a technical expert in the patent office in Bern. While he was supposed to be assessing other people's inventions. Einstein was actually developing his own ideas secretly. He is said to have jokingly called his desk drawer at work the "Bureau of theoretical physics" .

9. One of the famous papers of 1905 was Einstein's special Theory of Relativity, according to which time and distance are not absolute. Indeed to perfectly accurate clocks will not continue to show the same time if they come together again after a journey if one of them has been moving very fast relative to the other. From this followed the worlds most famous formula which describe the relationship between mass and energy:
E=mc^2