Albert Einstein

The most recognizable scientist in history — and the one most often quoted by people who haven't read him.

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879. He failed his first entrance exam to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic. He couldn't get an academic job after graduation and spent seven years working in a patent office in Bern. During those seven years, working in his spare time, he produced the special theory of relativity, the photoelectric effect (for which he won the Nobel Prize), and the equation E=mc². He was twenty-six.

He spent the rest of his life thinking about the nature of reality at a level of depth that most people can't follow — and then explaining it to people who couldn't follow it, with a patience and warmth that made him beloved rather than just respected. He cared about music (violin, obsessively), about civil rights, about pacifism, about the moral responsibilities of scientists. He was not just a physicist. He was a person who thought carefully about what it meant to be one.

His quotes on curiosity, imagination, and the nature of intelligence have spread so far that many of them are now misattributed. The real ones are better than the fake ones. They tend to arrive as permission — to wonder, to question, to refuse the easy answer.