Albert Einstein (1879 -1955)

     Einstein was born on March 14, 1879 in the German city of Ulm, but spent all his childhood and adolescence in Munich where his father owned a electrochemist workshop. He started to talk very late and this fact alarmed the whole family. He was a poor student, considered impaired by teachers, and was finally expelled from Luitpold school in Munich, at the age of 15. He gave up his German citizenship and went to live with his family in Milan, where he studied Mathematics, Physics and Natural Sciences. Even without finishing high school, he took the entry exam at the Zurich Polytechnic, but he didn't pass it. However, he already dominated, with only 16 years, the concepts of integration and differential calculus, the analytic geometry and the endless series. The following year, he started attending high school in Aarau, where he spent most of the time in the Physics' laboratory, finally making it to Zurich Polytechnic in 1896, where he graduated as a physics and mathematics secondary school teacher.

     Based on discoveries of Max Planck on the emission of electromagnetic energy, Einstein interpreted the photoelectric effect, for which he received the Nobel Prize of Physics 1921. In 1905, he had published the text which founded the theory of Special Relativity and would be worked in mathematical terms by Minkowski in 1907. In this year Einstein drew up the principle of equivalence between mass and energy, reaching the equation         E = mc^2. Based on the calculations of Minkowski and with the collaboration of Marcel Grossam in 1912, the mathematical foundations of the theory of General Relativity would be published in 1915. This same year, Einstein left Berlin where he had occupied the post of professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellshaft since 1914, and in the United States, at Princeton University. Einstein died on April 18, 1955 in Princeton without finding an universal unifying theory.