Albert Einstein
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98 free Albert Einstein trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
10 free Albert Einstein trivia questions with answers. How well do you know Albert Einstein? This trivia quiz features 10 challenging questions about the life, work, and legacy of the world's most famous physicist. From relativity theory to personal anecdotes, see how much you really know about Einstein's remarkable contributions to science.
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Q 01In which city was Albert Einstein born?
Ulm
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.
Q 02In what year was physicist Albert Einstein born?
1879
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.
Q 03In what year was Albert Einstein awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics?
1921
Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, though it was formally presented to him in 1922.
Q 04Taking a chair in Prague in 1911 required Einstein to accept citizenship of which empire?
Austro-Hungarian
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.
Q 05Which equation of Albert Einstein's says mass and energy are two forms of the same thing?
E=mc²
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.
Q 06In which year did Albert Einstein's four 'Annus Mirabilis' papers appear?
1905
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.
Q 07Which country's citizenship did Einstein renounce at 16, leaving him stateless for a time?
Germany
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.
Q 08In which city did Albert Einstein take his first academic teaching post, as a Privatdozent in 1908?
Bern
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.
Q 09Which best describes Albert Einstein's attitude to his early schooling at the Luitpold Gymnasium?
He resented rote learning and drill
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.
Q 10Einstein's 'miracle year' papers covered special relativity, Brownian motion, mass-energy equivalence and what else?
The photoelectric effect
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.
Q 11Unable to find a teaching job, Einstein became an assistant examiner in 1902 at what institution?
The Swiss Patent Office
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.
Q 12What ironic name did Einstein, Conrad Habicht and Maurice Solovine give their Bern discussion club?
The Olympia Academy
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'.
Q 13Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić, was of which ethnicity?
Serbian
Q 21Einstein's four 'miracle year' papers were all published in which German journal?
Annalen der Physik
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.
Q 22Einstein's 1905 paper on Brownian motion compelled physicists to accept the existence of what?
Atoms
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.
Q 23Special relativity reinterpreted the transformations named after which Dutch physicist?
Hendrik Lorentz
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.
Q 14As part of his 1919 divorce settlement, Einstein promised Mileva Marić what?
Any future Nobel Prize money
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.
Q 15Einstein's second wife, Elsa Löwenthal, was related to him how?
She was his cousin
She was his first cousin on his mother's side and second cousin on his father's; they married in 1919.
Q 16Whose observations of the 29 May 1919 solar eclipse confirmed Einstein's prediction that gravity bends light?
Arthur Eddington
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.
Q 17In 1933 Einstein took up a post he held until his death at which institution in Princeton, New Jersey?
The Institute for Advanced Study
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.
Q 18In 1952 Einstein was offered, and declined, which largely ceremonial office?
President of Israel
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.
Q 19Einstein died in April 1955 from internal bleeding caused by what?
A ruptured aortic aneurysm
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.
Q 20Which pathologist removed Einstein's brain during the autopsy, without his family's permission?
Thomas Stoltz Harvey
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.
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.
Q 24Which physicist first observed the photoelectric effect in 1887?
Heinrich Hertz
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.
Q 25Einstein signed the famous August 1939 letter to President Roosevelt, but which Hungarian physicist actually wrote it?
Leo Szilard
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.
Q 26How much did Einstein's brain weigh when the pathologist removed it in 1955?
1,230 grams
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.
Q 27With which Indian physicist did Einstein develop a form of quantum statistics bearing both their names?
Satyendra Nath Bose
Bose derived the Planck spectrum in 1924; particles that obey the statistics are now called bosons.
Q 28Which magazine named Einstein its Person of the Century in 1999?
Time
Time made the choice in 1999; Einstein had become perhaps the world's first celebrity scientist after the 1919 eclipse results.
Q 29Objecting to the fundamental randomness of quantum theory, Einstein famously declared what?
God does not play dice
'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.
Q 30On arriving in Antwerp in March 1933, what did Einstein do at the German consulate?
Surrendered his passport
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.