As a child of four or five lay sick in bed, bored and miserable, his father handed him a secondhand compass. The young Albert Einstein’s eyes brightened as he watched a needle being pulled by an invisible force. Over thirty years later, it was the childlike fascination of everyday wonders Einstein possessed that caused him to be so successful in the scientific world. By discovering the life story, accomplishments, and significance of the world-renowned physicist, Albert Einstein, one can truly discover the man behind the science.

The accomplishments of Albert Einstein trace back to his childhood, his struggle, his eventual fame. From his birth in 1979, Albert was a unique child. He showed, from an early age, a fascination of the universe and of motion, enjoying building things and sitting and thinking. However, he had no patience for authority. In elementary school at the Luitpold Gymnasium, Albert displayed a rebellious attitude towards the classes, which reminded him of “military drills.” Later on in his educational career, the teenage Albert decided to move with his family from his hometown of Munich to Milan, Italy. After renouncing his German citizenship and attending college at the Zurich Polytechnic, Einstein fell in love with and married Mileva Maric, the only female student in his class. At this point, Albert was twenty-two years old, a new father, and without a job to sustain his family. Luckily, Albert was able to get a job at the Bern Patent Office, where he would work for nine years beginning in 1902. In 1905, Einstein experienced a “miracle year,” where he published five papers on various topics, including special relativity. The scientific revolution Einstein and other physicists sparked called for many conferences around the world and led to Einstein’s worldwide fame. As Einstein grew older, he divorced Mileva and remarried to his cousin, Elsa. Through the years of World War II and until his death in 1955, Einstein researched and lectured at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein’s ingenuity, combined with his struggle, led to unprecedented fame.

 Albert Einstein’s life was filled with accomplishments, involving science, war, and peacemaking. In 1907, Albert had his “happiest thought,” where he thought of space and time not as two different dimensions, but of a continuous spectrum, or a continuum. Einstein, along with Lorentz, Poincare, Bohr, and many others, helped start the Solvay Conferences in 1910. Among the five papers in Einstein’s miracle, they included Brownian Motion, concerning the irregular movement of particles in a liquid, and possibly the best-known mathematical equation, e= Mc², or the equivalence principle, where energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared. These discoveries, taking place in 1905, won Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921. Later on in his life, Einstein discovered the ninety-ninth element, which was named Einsteinium in his honor.

Other awards Einstein won include the Copley Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1925 and the Franklin Medal in 1935. Einstein also had many awards created in his honor, including During World War II, Einstein corresponded with Franklin D. Roosevelt about the “race” to build the first atomic bomb, a method Einstein developed himself. Later on, however, Einstein regretted this decision because of his love of peace and harmony. Though Einstein’s life was one filled with science, he still accomplished much outside of the realm of physics. During and after World War II, Einstein embraced the idea of Zionism, a political movement to establish a safe haven for Jews in Israel. Being an informal Jew himself, he was called to be president of this state, but declined. Even though Einstein experienced obstacles throughout his life, his determination led to an incredible successful career in and out of science.

Einstein’s significance as a physicist and as a peacemaker continues to grow, even today. His scientific discoveries have led to countless inventions, including the microwave, the transistor radio, and the atomic bomb. His relativity theory, involving time dilation, sparked Star Trek and the world of science fictional time travel. Einstein’s general outlook on science and on the world has been taken on, to this day, by people worldwide. His opinion that “those should be the best loved who have contributed most to the elevation of the human race and human life” reflects the concept of utilitarianism. He also thought that science should not be about laboriously recording data, but it should be about making society efficient. Einstein’s relativity theories led to the reconsideration of the topics of space and time and many more physicists setting out to create a unified field theory, a theory that brings classical and modern physics together. Our society, especially in this day and age, has benefited tremendously from Albert Einstein’s scientific discoveries.

 As a child, staring in wonder at something as elementary as a compass, Einstein did not know he wanted to become a scientist. However, his questioning and his curiosity set up his eventual fame. Though Einstein’s high intelligence is the aspect in which we characterize modern-day geniuses, it is inspiring life journey, his accomplishments, and his significance in our society that marks him as the iconic scientific genius of the twentieth century.