Albert Einstein

1879 – 1955 · Germany · Physics

Nobel Prize in Physics, 1921

Rewrote space, time, gravity and light in a single year of work.

Summary^1,3,4

In 1905, working as a patent clerk in Bern, Einstein published four papers that established the reality of atoms, explained the photoelectric effect with light quanta, introduced special relativity and derived E=mc². Ten years later general relativity recast gravity as the curvature of spacetime, a prediction confirmed by starlight bending in 1919.

Achievements^1,2,3,5

Special relativity (1905) and general relativity (1915)
Explained the photoelectric effect, founding quantum theory — the work the Nobel cited
Derived mass–energy equivalence, E=mc²
Predicted gravitational waves in 1916, directly detected by LIGO a century later in 2015

Principal works^1,4

On the Electrodynamics of Moving BodiesThe Foundation of the General Theory of RelativityRelativity: The Special and General Theory

How the work shapes the world today^2,5

GPS satellites correct for both special and general relativity or navigation would drift kilometres a day, so relativity is running in every phone. Photovoltaic solar panels and digital camera sensors work by the photoelectric effect he explained. Gravitational-wave astronomy is now a functioning observational field. His refugee status and public warnings about nationalism and nuclear weapons made him the model of the scientist as moral voice.

Posterity and the family line^1,5

Einstein had a daughter, Lieserl, with Mileva Marić before their marriage — her fate is unknown — and two sons; he later married his cousin Elsa.

5 people · 3 generations · 3 links with primary documentation

Lieserl
1902 – ?
Daughter
Known only from letters between Einstein and Mileva Marić discovered in 1986. She either died of scarlet fever in 1903 or was given up for adoption in Serbia; no birth or death record has ever been found.
Contested
Hans Albert Einstein
1904 – 1973
Son
Professor of hydraulic engineering at Berkeley; the Einstein bed-load function is still used to model sediment transport in rivers, and so underwrites flood engineering worldwide.
Documented
Eduard Einstein
1910 – 1965
Son
A gifted pianist and medical student; diagnosed with schizophrenia at twenty and spent most of his life at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich. Left no children.
Documented

via Hans Albert Einstein
Bernhard Caesar Einstein
1930 – 2008
Grandson
Physicist and engineer in Switzerland; the only grandson to have children, so every living Einstein descendant runs through him.
Documented

Every link carries its own evidence. Documented means a register, will, archive or prize record names the relationship; attested rests on scholarly reference; contested is disputed between sources; and where the record runs out it is marked rather than filled in.

Talks and interviews

Continuity of ideas

Who shaped Albert Einstein, and who they shaped

Inherited from4

Baruch Spinoza
1632 – 1677 · Philosophy
Einstein professed 'Spinoza's God' — lawful nature rather than a personal deity.
Isaac Newton
1643 – 1727 · Physics, Mathematics
General relativity keeps Newtonian gravity as its weak-field limit and replaces its absolute space.
James Clerk Maxwell
1831 – 1879 · Physics, Mathematics
Special relativity is written to keep Maxwell's constant light speed for every observer.
Max Planck
1858 – 1947 · Physics
The quantum of action becomes, in Einstein's hands, the light quantum of the photoelectric paper.

Passed the work to4

Erwin Schrödinger
1887 – 1961 · Physics, Biology
The wave equation follows de Broglie and Einstein's insistence on wave–particle duality.
Satyendra Nath Bose
1894 – 1974 · Physics
Einstein translated and extended Bose's statistics, producing Bose–Einstein condensation.
Stephen Hawking
1942 – 2018 · Physics, Astronomy
Hawking radiation joins general relativity to quantum field theory at the horizon.
Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar
1910 – 1995 · Astronomy, Physics
Relativistic degeneracy — the Chandrasekhar limit — applies special relativity to dying stars.

Sources and references

Numbered markers in the text above point to the entries below. Each links to a primary document, archival collection or scholarly reference where the claim about Albert Einstein can be checked.