96 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.

Einstein's birthday falls on which annual celebration?

Pi Day is 14 March, written 3/14 in the US after the first digits of pi; Einstein was born on that date in 1879, and Princeton, his home for over twenty years, celebrates both together each year.

Einstein's delayed 1921 Nobel Prize was announced alongside which rival's 1922 prize?

Niels Bohr took the 1922 physics prize in the year Einstein's held-over 1921 award was finally made; the committee had judged no 1921 nominee to meet the criteria and reserved that prize for a year.

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

Austro-Hungarian: Prague then lay in the Habsburg empire, and the chair at its German university was a state post tied to Austrian citizenship; Einstein stayed little more than a year before taking a chair back in Switzerland.

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.

Whose 1666 'miracle year' is Einstein's 1905 often likened to?

Isaac Newton, sent home when plague closed Cambridge, laid the groundwork for calculus, optics and gravitation around 1666; the Latin tag for such a year, annus mirabilis, was later borrowed for Einstein's 1905.

Why did Einstein never work on the atomic bomb project his 1939 letter helped launch?

He was denied security clearance: in July 1940 the Army judged his pacifist leanings a security risk, so the man whose signature helped start the bomb project was shut out of it.

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.

A stubborn myth says the schoolboy Einstein failed which subject?

Mathematics: shown a 1935 newspaper claim that he had failed it, Einstein laughed and replied that he had mastered differential and integral calculus before he was fifteen.

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 took him on in June 1902 after his classmate Marcel Grossmann's father recommended him to its director; he wrote his great 1905 papers in his spare time around the job.

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

The Olympia Academy was the three friends' mock-grand name for evenings arguing over Hume, Mach and Poincaré from 1902, usually in Einstein's flat; Habicht even gave him a mock-noble title as its 'president'.

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

Serbian: Marić, born in 1875 to a Serbian family in Titel, then part of Hungary, was the only woman in Einstein's college class; his 1901 letter calling relative motion 'our work' still fuels debate over her part in his physics.

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.

What was Elsa Löwenthal to Einstein before she became his second wife?

She was his cousin twice over, a first cousin through their mothers and a second cousin through their fathers; born Elsa Einstein, she ended up with her maiden name as her married name.

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 was still being set up when its founder, Abraham Flexner, visited Einstein's German summer house and won his promise to join; Einstein arrived in 1933 and never left.

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.

The pathologist who took Einstein's brain kept most of it for decades in what?

Glass jars held the sliced brain for more than twenty years: Thomas Harvey kept the two of them in a cider box and took it with him from Princeton to Kansas, where a reporter tracked him down in 1978.

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

Annalen der Physik, the leading physics journal of the day, then edited by Paul Drude, printed all four papers; Einstein was no stranger to it, having published there since 1901 and written reviews for it.

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

Atoms: Einstein showed that the jiggling of pollen-sized specks in water is just what bombardment by unseen particles would produce, 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.

General relativity explained a long-puzzling drift in the orbit of which planet?

Mercury's orbit swings round the Sun slightly faster than older physics allowed, and astronomers had blamed an unseen planet they named Vulcan; Einstein's 1915 theory accounted for the gap with no extra planet.

Einstein signed the famous August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, but which fellow émigré physicist drafted it?

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

The 'Einstein–Rosen bridge' that Einstein and Nathan Rosen described in 1935 is better known as what?

A wormhole: working through general relativity's equations, the pair found a tunnel-like bridge joining two regions of spacetime; physicist John Wheeler later gave such bridges their catchier name.

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

Satyendra Nath Bose posted Einstein his 1924 paper on light quanta when it was not accepted for publication; Einstein translated it into German himself and got it printed, and particles obeying their statistics are now called bosons.

In 1999 Time magazine named Einstein its Person of the what?

Century: Time's editors judged that the 1900s would be remembered above all for science and technology and made Einstein the symbol of its scientists; he had been a celebrity ever since the 1919 eclipse results.

Einstein famously summed up his objection to quantum theory in which phrase?

'God does not play dice' is a paraphrase: in a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein granted that quantum mechanics 'says a lot' but added that he was convinced 'He is not playing at dice'.

Landing in Belgium in March 1933, what did Einstein do at Germany's diplomatic mission in Brussels?

Surrendered his passport: after docking at Antwerp on 28 March 1933, Einstein handed it in at the German mission in Brussels and renounced his citizenship, then lived for months in the Belgian resort of De Haan.

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

To avoid conscription into military service is the usual account: he would have become liable at seventeen, so with his father's approval he gave up his citizenship first and stayed stateless for five years.

Which German scientist travelled to Switzerland in 1913 to lure Einstein to a research post in Berlin?

Max Planck came with the chemist Walther Nernst and an offer hard to refuse: a seat in the Prussian Academy, a professorship with no teaching duties and the directorship of a planned physics institute.

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

Mozart: the sonatas turned lessons he had disliked since the age of five into a passion, and from then on a violin went with him almost everywhere, even on his travels abroad.

Einstein helped found which institution, opened in 1925, that later inherited his papers and literary estate?

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem was the cause that first took Einstein to America: Chaim Weizmann enlisted him for a fund-raising tour in 1921, four years before it opened.

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 HBCU to grant degrees; accepting his there, Einstein called racism 'a disease of white people' and said he did not intend to be quiet about it.

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

Bertrand Russell drafted the manifesto, a warning that nuclear war could end humanity; signing it was one of Einstein's last acts, and Russell released it in London that July, after his death.

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.

When ninety-three German intellectuals publicly backed the war in 1914, how did Einstein respond?

He signed a rival peace appeal, the 'Manifesto to the Europeans' drafted by the physiologist Georg Nicolai; against ninety-three names it drew just four, and it went unpublished at the time.

Which thought experiment did Einstein first try at sixteen?

Chasing a light beam: he asked what a light wave would look like to someone keeping pace with it, a paradox he later said already held the germ of special relativity.

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

Schizophrenia: Eduard, a gifted student, had begun medicine hoping to become a psychiatrist when he fell ill around 1930; he was in and out of Zurich's Burghölzli clinic from 1932 and died there in 1965.

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

A compass: the needle held its direction with nothing visibly touching it, which convinced the boy that 'something deeply hidden had to be behind things', a wonder he still recalled in old age.

As a small child, Einstein worried his parents by being unusually slow to do what?

Talk: Einstein was so slow to start speaking that his parents feared something was wrong, and the economist Thomas Sowell later borrowed his name for bright children who talk late, calling the pattern 'Einstein syndrome'.

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

The Pythagorean theorem: at twelve, after an uncle 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 shone on the science side of the exam but failed the general part, so he spent a year finishing school and enrolled in 1896, graduating in 1900 with a teaching diploma.

Einstein's first published paper, in 1901, dealt with which behaviour of liquids?

Capillarity: 'Conclusions Drawn from the Phenomena of Capillarity' appeared in 1901; Einstein later wrote the paper off as one of his two worthless beginner's works.

Which everyday technology must correct for both of Einstein's theories of relativity to stay accurate?

GPS navigation depends on satellite clocks that run about 38 microseconds a day fast once both theories are counted; left uncorrected, positions would drift by roughly ten kilometres a day.

Which quantum phenomenon did Einstein famously deride as 'spooky action at a distance'?

Quantum entanglement ties particles together so that measuring one seems to fix the other instantly, however far apart; Einstein took that as proof the theory was incomplete, but later experiments showed the effect is real.

Letters made public in the 1980s revealed what about Einstein and Mileva Marić?

A daughter before marriage: Lieserl was born in early 1902, a year before the wedding, and is last mentioned in a 1903 letter, ill with scarlet fever; whether she died or was adopted is unknown.

Einstein's 1905 paper introducing special relativity is titled 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving' what?

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

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

Hermann Minkowski, once one of Einstein's own professors, recast special relativity in 1908 as the geometry of four-dimensional spacetime; Einstein went on to build general relativity on that formalism.

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 Britain's leading scientists heard the eclipse results at a joint meeting in London; the coverage made Einstein a global celebrity overnight.

In which Asian country did Einstein spend weeks on a lecture tour in late 1922?

Japan: he sailed there as a publisher's guest and learned on the journey that he had won the Nobel Prize, so the German ambassador stood in for him in Stockholm while crowds lined Tokyo's streets to see him.

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

Henri Bergson disputed Einstein's account of time before the French Society of Philosophy and in a book that year; the quarrel was famous enough for the Nobel presentation speech of 1922 to mention his challenge to relativity.

Which film star made Einstein his special guest at a 1931 Hollywood premiere?

Charlie Chaplin and Einstein were cheered together at the premiere of City Lights, and Chaplin is said to have told him: 'They cheer me because they understand me, and they cheer you because no one understands you.'

Which California campus hosted Einstein as a visiting scientist for three winters from 1931?

Caltech's head, Robert Millikan, brought him to Pasadena for three winter visits; he was there in January 1933 when Hitler took power, and he never lived in Germany again.

At his lakeside summer house in Caputh, what was Einstein's favourite pastime, though he never learned to swim?

Sailing: friends gave him a boat for his fiftieth birthday and he spent hours alone on the Havel lakes, refusing a life jacket though he could not swim; the Nazis confiscated the boat in 1933.

In 1933 Einstein asked which future prime minister to help Jewish scientists out of Germany?

Winston Churchill had him to lunch at Chartwell and set a physicist friend to finding the scientists posts at British universities; that autumn Einstein lived under armed guard in a hut on a Norfolk heath.

With which logician did Einstein take long walks in Princeton during his final years?

Kurt Gödel, the Austrian logician of the incompleteness theorems, became a close friend; Einstein reportedly said his own work no longer meant much and that he came in to work 'to have the privilege of walking home with Gödel'.

As a boy in Munich, Einstein went to an elementary school of which faith?

Catholic: he was the only Jew among some seventy classmates, while lessons in Judaism from a relative at home made him, for a time, far more devout than his parents.

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 was his house guest on many later visits to the town.

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

W. E. B. Du Bois, then 83, was charged with failing to register as a foreign agent over a peace petition; the judge dismissed the case after the defence announced that Einstein would testify to his character.

Which US agency kept a secret file of more than 1,400 pages on Einstein's politics?

The FBI opened its file in 1932, before he had even settled in America, and kept adding to it until he died, logging his pacifism, his civil-rights work and his friends on the left.

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

Mahatma Gandhi and Einstein traded warm letters in 1931, after one of Gandhi's followers called at Einstein's summer house and carried the first one back, but the two never managed to meet.

Einstein's 1954 letter dismissing the Bible as 'primitive legends' goes by what nickname?

The God letter, written to the philosopher Eric Gutkind a year before Einstein died, calls the word God 'the expression and product of human weaknesses'; it sold for $2.9 million in 2018, nearly double its estimate.

Which famous thinker did Einstein exchange letters with in 1932 on the causes of war?

Sigmund Freud took up Einstein's question at the prompting of a League of Nations body for intellectual cooperation; their exchange of letters was published in 1933 as 'Why War?'.

What became of Einstein's ashes?

Scattered in secret: at his own wish he was cremated in Trenton within hours, and the ashes were scattered after a simple ceremony at a spot never disclosed, so he has no grave.

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

His ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, was handed the eyes by Thomas Harvey, the same pathologist who removed the brain and kept it for decades.

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

LIGO's twin detectors, in Louisiana and the Pacific Northwest, caught the tremor of two black holes merging on 14 September 2015; Einstein himself had been convinced such waves would never be measured.

What name, adopted in 1926, do physicists now use for the 'light quanta' Einstein proposed in 1905?

Photons: Einstein himself spoke only of light quanta; the modern name was put forward two decades later by the chemist Gilbert N. Lewis in a letter to the journal Nature, and it stuck.

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

The laser carries Einstein's idea in its name, 'light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation'; Theodore Maiman built the first working one in 1960, more than forty years after the paper.

The ultracold state of matter Einstein predicted was first created in 1995 using which element?

Rubidium: Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman chilled a tiny cloud of it to a fraction of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero; a sodium version followed within months, and the work won the 2001 Nobel Prize.

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

A refrigerator with no moving parts is said to have been the pair's answer to a newspaper report of a family killed in their beds by toxic gas leaking from their fridge; the design ran on heat alone.

Which Star Wars character's face was modelled partly on Einstein's?

Yoda: make-up artist Stuart Freeborn based the puppet's face on his own features and Einstein's, hoping the borrowed likeness would make the little Jedi master look intelligent.

Einsteinium was first identified in the fallout of which 1952 hydrogen-bomb test?

Ivy Mike, detonated at Enewetak Atoll on 1 November 1952, left einsteinium in its debris; fewer than 200 atoms were recovered, from filter papers that aircraft had flown through the cloud.

Einstein spent his last thirty years trying to unite gravity in a single theory with which other force?

The electromagnetic force: he hoped a 'unified field theory' would show it and gravity to be two faces of one field, but none of his attempts succeeded.

In which US city does a giant bronze Einstein sit outside the National Academy of Sciences?

Washington, D.C.: Robert Berks's seated bronze was unveiled in 1979 to mark the centenary of Einstein's birth, and the papers in its hand are engraved with three of his equations.

The Einstein Tower in Potsdam was built to house what?

A solar telescope: Erich Mendelsohn's tower was built to test relativity's prediction about the Sun's light, though Einstein never worked there; shown round it, he is said to have summed it up in one word, 'organic'.

In the famous 1951 birthday photograph, what is Einstein doing?

Sticking out his tongue: already in the car after his birthday party and asked to pose once more, he pulled the face at photographer Arthur Sasse instead, then liked the result enough to order prints for himself.

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

Genius gave its whole first season to Einstein, with Johnny Flynn as the young man and Rush as the old, drawing on Walter Isaacson's biography; the anthology then moved on to Picasso.

In which 2023 film was Einstein portrayed by Tom Conti?

Oppenheimer gives Tom Conti's Einstein pivotal scenes with its hero, but those conversations are invented: the real Oppenheimer took his fear of a runaway chain reaction to the physicist Arthur Compton.

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.

Why did Einstein agree to co-write The Evolution of Physics?

To support a colleague, at least in part: his co-author, the Polish physicist Leopold Infeld, had not had his fellowship renewed and needed the income, so he proposed a popular book and Einstein agreed.

On what grounds did the Swiss army reject Einstein in 1901?

Flat feet, together with varicose veins, got the new Swiss citizen declared unfit at his army medical in 1901, so he never had to serve.

Consoling Michele Besso's family in 1955, Einstein called the distinction between past, present and future a persistent what?

Illusion: Besso, the friend thanked in the 1905 relativity paper, had 'preceded me a little in parting from this strange world', Einstein wrote; he followed him the very next month.

Which double Nobel laureate sat with Einstein in the famous 1927 Solvay Conference photograph?

Marie Curie alone among the twenty-nine held Nobel Prizes in two sciences; the week is remembered for the start of Einstein's long argument over what quantum theory means.

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

A hydraulic engineer: Hans Albert trained as a civil engineer, followed his father to America in 1938 and became a Berkeley professor known for working out how rivers carry sediment.

Which instrument did Einstein's mother Pauline play well?

The piano: Pauline Einstein was a keen and able pianist, and it was she who started Albert on the violin at about five, lessons he resisted until his teens.

Which body awarded Einstein the 1925 Copley Medal?

The Royal Society honoured him for his theory of relativity as well as his quantum work, unlike the Nobel committee, whose citation three years earlier had left relativity out.

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

Vegetarian: Einstein went without meat and fish only in his last years, on his doctors' orders; in a 1954 letter he said he felt well on it and that man was perhaps not born to be a carnivore.

Under what label did Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark attack Einstein's relativity in the 1920s and 1930s?

Jewish physics was their slur for relativity and other modern theory, set against a supposedly German physics rooted in experiment; the attacks grew until Einstein resigned from the Prussian Academy in 1933.

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

Pugwash, Nova Scotia, was the birthplace of the industrialist Cyrus Eaton, who offered to pay for the scientists' first meeting in 1957; the movement it started shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize.

Einstein's 1905 doctoral thesis set out a new way to determine the size of what?

Molecules: 'A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions', dedicated to his friend Marcel Grossmann, was the most modest of his five papers that year, yet it was the one that earned him his doctorate.

In relativity's 'twin paradox', how does the twin who makes a fast round trip through space come home?

Younger than the other twin: moving clocks run slow, so less time passes for the traveller; astronaut Scott Kelly aged a few milliseconds less during a year in orbit than his twin brother Mark did on Earth.