Einstein was born in Ulm in 1879 — and never failed maths

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, in the kingdom of Württemberg, Germany, though he barely knew the town: six weeks later the family moved to Munich, where his father founded an electrical engineering company and Albert went to school at the Luitpold Gymnasium.

Did Einstein fail maths?

No; the story that the century’s most famous physicist was bad at mathematics doesn’t survive his record. He began studying calculus around 1891, at about 12. What he did fail, in 1895, was the entrance examination for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, which he sat at 16. He finished school in Aarau instead, then entered the Polytechnic in 1896 to train as a teacher of physics and mathematics. In a classroom essay written in French at Aarau, he explained the choice himself:

“Above all it is my individual disposition for abstract and mathematical thought, my lack of imagination and practical talent.” — Albert Einstein, aged 16

What did Einstein win the Nobel Prize for?

Not relativity. The 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics honoured his services to theoretical physics and “especially” the law of the photoelectric effect, and was only presented to him in 1922. Unable to find a teaching post, he had joined the Swiss Patent Office, where in his spare time he produced the 1905 papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion and special relativity; his general theory of relativity followed in 1916.

The German-born physicist also spent years without a country. He renounced his German citizenship in 1896, remained stateless until Switzerland naturalised him in 1901, and later became a US citizen in 1940 while keeping his Swiss citizenship. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18, 1955.