Albert Einstein was born

On March 14, 1879, Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, in the kingdom of Württemberg, Germany. His parents, Hermann and Pauline Einstein, were secular Jews; his father worked in engineering and sales. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where the boy began his schooling.

The child who reportedly spoke late grew into the physicist who, in his “miracle year” of 1905, published work on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and special relativity—then, a decade later, the theory of general relativity, which recast gravity as the bending of space and time.

His name became shorthand for genius; his equations reshaped how we understand the cosmos.

Einstein won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded chiefly for the photoelectric effect rather than relativity. He died in 1955, having spent his final decades in the United States and become one of the most recognizable figures of the twentieth century.