Albert

MyGen Profile GeneratorMarch 14, 1879 â€“ April 18, 1955
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely considered to have been the greatest physicist of all time. While best known for the theory of relativity (and specifically mass-energy equivalence, E=mcÂ²), he was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect.
Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity which extended the principle of relativity to nonuniform motion, creating a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.
Works by Albert Einstein include more than fifty scientific papers but also several non-scientific works, including About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein. (1930), Why War? (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), and Out of My Later Years (1950).
In 1999 Einstein was named Time magazine's "Person of the Century". In popular culture the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius.
Albert Einstein was born into a Jewish family in Ulm, WÃ¼rttemberg, Germany. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman. His mother was Pauline Einstein, (nÃ©e Koch).
His parents worried about his intellectual development because of initial language delay and speech difficulties until the age of nine, although he was a top student in elementary school. Thomas Sowell used Einstein's name for a book on such children.
In 1880, the family moved to Munich where his father and his uncle founded a company called Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Cie that manufactured electrical equipment, providing the first lighting for the Oktoberfest and cabling for the Munich suburb of Schwabing. The Einstein family was not strictly observant, and Albert attended a Catholic elementary school. At his mother's insistence he took violin lessons, and although he disliked them and eventually quit he would later take great pleasure in Mozart's violin sonatas.
When Albert was five, his father showed him a pocket compass. Albert saw that something in empty space was moving the needle and later described the experience as one of the most revelatory of his life. As he grew Albert built models and mechanical devices for fun, and began to show a talent for mathematics.
In 1889, a family friend named Max Talmud, a medical student, introduced the ten-year-old Albert to key science and philosophy texts, including Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Euclid's Elements (Einstein called it the "holy little geometry book"). From Euclid Albert began to understand deductive reasoning (integral to theoretical physics), and at the age of twelve he learned Euclidean geometry from a school booklet. He soon began to investigate calculus.
In his early teens Albert attended the new and progressive Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering but Albert clashed with authorities and resented the school regimen. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning.
In 1894, when Einstein was fifteen, his father's business failed and the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then after a few months to Pavia. During this time Albert wrote his first "scientific work", "The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields". Albert had been left behind in Munich to finish high school but in the spring of 1895 he withdrew, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note, to join his family in Pavia.
Rather than completing high school Albert decided to apply directly to the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. Without a school certificate he was required to take an entrance examination. He did not pass. Einstein wrote that it was in that same year, at age 16, that he first performed his famous thought experiment, visualizing travelling alongside a beam of light.
The Einsteins sent Albert to Aarau, Switzerland to finish secondary school. While lodging with the family of Professor Jost Winteler, he fell in love with the family's daughter, Sofia Marie-Jeanne Amanda Winteler, called "Marie". (Albert's sister, Maja, his confidant, later married Paul Winteler.) In Aarau Albert studied Maxwell's electromagnetic theory. In 1896 he graduated at age 17, renounced German citizenship to avoid military service (with his father's approval), and finally enrolled in the mathematics program at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. On February 21, 1901, he gained Swiss citizenship, which he never revoked. Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.
In 1896, Mileva Maric also enrolled at the Federal Polytechnic Institute, the only woman studying Mathematics. During the next few years Einstein and Maric's friendship developed into romance. Einstein's mother objected because she thought Maric too old, not Jewish and "physically defective". Einstein and Maric had a daughter, Lieserl Einstein, born in January 1902. Her fate is unknown.
In 1900, Einstein's friend Michele Besso introduced him to the work of Ernst Mach. That year Einstein published a paper in the prestigious Annalen der Physik entitled "Folgerungen aus den CapillaritÃ¤tserscheinungen" ("Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena"), on the capillary forces of a straw. He graduated from the Federal Polytechnic Institute with a teaching diploma.
The patent office
On graduation Einstein could not find a teaching post; some say his brashness had irritated his professors. After almost two years of searching, a former classmate's father helped him get a job in Bern at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, the patent office, as an assistant examiner. His responsibility was evaluating patent applications for electromagnetic devices. He learned to discern the essence of applications despite applicants' sometimes poor descriptions, and the director taught him "to express [him]self correctly".
Einstein occasionally corrected design errors while evaluating patent applications. In 1903, Einstein's position at the Swiss Patent Office was made permanent, although he was passed over for promotion until he "fully mastered machine technology".
Einstein's college friend, Michele Besso, also worked at the patent office. With friends they met in Bern they formed a weekly discussion club on science and philosophy, jokingly named "The Olympia Academy". Their readings included PoincarÃ©, Mach and Hume.
Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903, and their relationship was, for their time, a personal and intellectual partnership. Einstein wrote of Mileva as "a creature who is my equal and who is as strong and independent as I am." The extent of Maric's influence on Einstein's work has been widely debated. On May 14, 1904, Albert and Mileva's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born. Their second son, Eduard Einstein, was born on July 28, 1910.
The Annus Mirabilis
In 1905, while working in the patent office, Einstein published four times in the Annalen der Physik. These are the papers that history has come to call the "Annus Mirabilis Papers":
* "On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" on the photoelectric effect (completed March 17) * "On the Motion Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid" on Brownian motion (received by Annalen der Physik May 11) * "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" on special relativity (received by Annalen der Physik June 30) * "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?" on equivalence of matter and energy (received by Annalen der Physik September 27, 1905)
At the age of 26, having studied under Alfred Kleiner, Professor of Experimental Physics, Einstein was awarded a PhD by the University of Zurich. His dissertation was entitled "Eine neue Bestimmung der MolekÃ¼ldimensionen" ("A new determination of molecular dimensions"); it was completed April 30, 1905 and accepted in July.
General relativity
In 1906, the patent office promoted Einstein to Technical Examiner Second Class, but he was not giving up on academia. In 1908, he became a Privatdozent. In the interval he wrote a paper on critical opalescence that described the cumulative effect of light scattered by individual molecules in the atmosphere, i.e. why the sky is blue.
During 1909, Einstein presented a paper "The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation" ("Ãœber die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen Ã¼ber das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung") on the quantization of light. In this and in an earlier 1909 paper, Einstein showed that Max Planck's energy quanta must have a well-defined momentum and act as independent, point-like particles. This paper is the introduction of the modern "photon" concept (although the term itself was introduced in a 1926 paper by Gilbert N. Lewis). Even more importantly, Einstein showed that light must be simultaneously a wave and a particle.
In 1911, Einstein became an associate professor at the UniversitÃ¤t ZÃ¼rich, however shortly afterward he accepted a full professorship at the Univerzita Karlova in Prague, Czechloslovakia. While in Prague, Einstein published a paper challenging astronomers to test a prediction of his nascent theory of relativity: that gravity affected even light, producing a "redshift" that should be measurable during a solar eclipse. German astronomer Erwin Freundlich publicized Einstein's challenge to scientists around the world.
In 1912, Einstein returned to Switzerland to accept a professorship at the ETH ZÃ¼rich. There he met mathematician Marcel Grossmann who introduced him to Riemannian geometry, and at the recommendation of Italian mathematician Tullio Levi-Civita, Einstein began exploring the usefulness of general covariance (essentially the use of tensors) for his gravitational theory. It was at this time that Einstein began to refer to time as the fourth dimension, as H.G. Wells had done in his 1895 novel The Time Machine.
Just before the start of World War I, after many relocations, Mileva took the children back to Zurich to establish a permanent home. Einstein took a professorship at the UniversitÃ¤t unter den Linden and settled in Berlin, Germany where he reapplied for German citizenship. In Berlin he became a member of the PreuÃŸische Akademie der Wissenschaften and from 1914 to 1933 he was also the director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft for physics.
During World War I the speeches and writings of Central Powers scientists were only available to Central Powers academics for national security reasons. Some of Einstein's work did reach the UK and the USA through the efforts of the Austrian Paul Ehrenfest and physicists in the Netherlands, especially 1902 Nobel Prize-winner Hendrik Lorentz, and Willem de Sitter of the Universiteit Leiden. After the war ended Einstein accepted a contract as a "buitengewoon hoogleraar" for the Universiteit Leiden, and travelled there regularly to lecture between 1920 and 1946.
In 1917, Einstein published an article in Physkalische Zeitschrift that proposed the possibility of stimulated emission, the physical technique that makes possible both the laser and the nuclear warhead. He also published a paper that described a cosmological constant, applying the general theory of relativity to the behavior of the entire universe.
1917 was the year astronomers began taking Einstein up on his 1911 challenge from Prague. The Mount Wilson Observatory in California, USA, published a solar spectroscopic analysis that showed no gravitational redshift. In 1918 the Lick Observatory, also in California, announced that they too had disproven Einstein's prediction, although their findings were not published.
However, in May of 1919, a team led by British astronomer Arthur Eddington claimed to have confirmed Einstein's prediction of gravitational deflection of starlight by the Sun while photographing a solar eclipse in Brazil and Principe, and Eddington brought it to the attention of the popular press. On November 7, 1919, leading British newspaper The Times printed a banner headline: "Revolution in Science â€“ New Theory of the Universe â€“ Newtonian Ideas Overthrown". In an interview Nobel laureate Max Born praised general relativity as the "greatest feat of human thinking about nature"; fellow laureate Paul Dirac was quoted saying it was "probably the greatest scientific discovery ever made".
The publicity that followed made Albert Einstein world-famous. Ironically, later examination of the photographs taken on the Eddington expedition showed that the experimental uncertainty was about the same as the size of the effect Eddington claimed to have demonstrated. The deflection of light during an eclipse has, however, been more accurately measured and confirmed by a number of later observations. There was some resentment toward Einstein's fame in the scientific community, notably among German physicists who would later start the Deutsche Physik anti-Einstein movement.
Having lived apart for five years, Einstein and Mileva divorced on February 14, 1919. On June 2 of that year Einstein married Elsa LÃ¶wenthal, who had nursed him through an illness. Elsa was Albert's first cousin (maternally) and his second cousin (paternally). Together the Einsteins raised Margot and Ilse, Elsa's daughters from her first marriage.
In 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for, not for relativity, but for his 1905 publication on the photoelectric effect: On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light. This paper alone was recognized by the Nobel committee because it was supported by the experimental evidence of the day. The committee did express the opinion that in due course all of Einstein's work would be confirmed.
Einstein's four 1905 publications radically changed the way physicists viewed the world, and together they are known as the Annus Mirabilis Papers (Annus mirabilis meaning 'year of wonders' in Latin).
Einstein travelled to New York City in the United States of America for the first time on April 2, 1921. When asked where he got his scientific ideas, Einstein explained that he believed scientific work best proceeds from an examination of physical reality and a search for underlying axioms, with consistent explanations that apply in all instances and avoid contradicting each other. He also recommended theories with visualizable results.
Unified field theory
Although he continued to be lauded for his work in theoretical physics, Einstein's research after general relativity consisted primarily of a long series of attempts to generalize his theory of gravitation in order to unify and simplify the fundamental laws of physics, particularly gravitation and electromagnetism. In 1950, he described this effort, which he referred to as the "Unified Field Theory", in a Scientific American article entitled "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation".
Einstein became increasingly isolated in his research, and his attempts were ultimately unsuccessful. In his pursuit of a unification of the fundamental forces he ignored mainstream developments in physics (and vice versa), most notably the discovery of the strong and weak nuclear forces, which were not well understood until many years after Einstein's death. Einstein's goal of unifying the laws of physics under a single model survives in the current drive for the grand unification theory.
Collaboration and conflict - Boseâ€“Einstein statistics
In 1924, Einstein received a statistical model from Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose which showed that light could be understood as a gas. Bose's statistics applied to some atoms as well as to the proposed light particles, and Einstein published an article in the Zeitschrift fÃ¼r Physik describing Bose's model and its implications, among them the Boseâ€“Einstein condensate phenomenon that should appear at very low temperatures. It wasn't until 1995 that the first such condensate was produced experimentally by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman using ultra-cooling equipment at the University of Colorado at Boulder's NIST-JILA laboratory. Boseâ€“Einstein statistics are now used to describe the behaviors of any assembly of "bosons", identical particles. Einstein's sketches for this project may be seen in the Einstein Archive in the library of the Universiteit Leiden.
Boltzmann Distribution
Einstein worked with Erwin SchrÃ¶dinger on a refinement of the Boltzmann distribution, a mixed classical and quantum mechanical gas model, although he declined to have his name included on the paper.
The Einstein Refrigerator
In 1926, Einstein and his former student LeÃ³ SzilÃ¡rd, a Hungarian physicist who later worked on the Manhattan Project and is credited with the discovery of the chain reaction, co-invented (and in 1930 patented) the Einstein refrigerator, novel for having no moving parts and using only heat as an input.
Bohr v. Einstein
As quantum theory extended to quantum mechanics, Einstein began to object to the statistical interpretation of the theory promoted by physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, the "Copenhagen Interpretation"; this developed into an ongoing debate between Einstein and Bohr. In a 1926 letter to Max Born, Einstein wrote: "I, at any rate, am convinced that He does not throw dice.". Einstein's long-time friend Bohr told Born to tell Einstein: "Stop telling God what to do!"
Einstein's disagreement with Bohr revolved around scientific determinism. Although Bohr rebutted all of Einstein's specific arguments against the prevailing interpretation of quantum theory, Einstein was never satisfied by its intrinsically incomplete description of nature. In 1935, he collaborated with Boris Podolsky and Nathan Rosen on further exploration of his concerns, explained in the EPR paradox.
Religious views
The question of scientific determinism gave rise to questions about Einstein's position on theological determinism, and even whether or not he believed in God. Einstein was interested in the Ethical Culture movement and a sponsor of the First Humanist Society of New York. Judaism being a cultural and racial heritage as well as a faith, Einstein saw no conflict in exploring theology: "A Jew who sheds his faith along the way, or who even picks up a different one, is still a Jew," he wrote. In 1929, Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein sent him a telegram that read: "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words. Stop." Einstein's answer was: "I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." The question was seemingly immortal, however, and in 1940, Einstein wrote an article for Nature entitled "Science and Religion" which included the poignant statement "...science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind..."
Dangerous Politics
With increasing public demands, his involvement in political, humanitarian and academic projects in various countries and his new acquaintances with scholars and political figures from around the world, Einstein was less able to get the productive isolation that, according to biographer Ronald W. Clark, he needed in order to work. As "the smartest man alive" Einstein found himself called on, like Solomon, to give conclusive judgments on matters that had nothing to do with theoretical physics or mathematics. He was not a timid man, and he was a man who was aware of the world around him, with no illusion that ignoring politics would make world events fade away. His very visible position allowed him to speak and write frankly, even provocatively, at a time when many people of conscience could only flee to the underground or keep doubts about developments within their own movements to themselves for fear of internecine fighting. Einstein flouted the ascendant Nazi movement, tried to be a voice of moderation in the tumultuous formation of the State of Israel and braved anti-communist politics and resistance to the civil rights movement in the United States.
Nazism
Einstein was a cultural zionist. Einstein was a co-founder of the liberal German Democratic Party[citation needed] In 1931, The Macmillan Company published About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein. Querido Ferlag, an Amsterdam publishing house, collected eleven of Einstein's essays into a 1933 book entitled Mein Weltbilt, translated to English as The World as I See It; Einstein's forward dedicates the collection "to the Jews of Germany". In the face of rising Nazi militarism Einstein remained a pacifist, even attempting to muster an alternative to armed response.
In January of 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. One of the first actions of Hitler's administration was the "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums" (the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service) which removed Jews and "politically suspect" government employees (including university professors) from their jobs, unless they had demonstrated their loyalty to Germany by serving in World War I. In December of 1932, Einstein had prudently travelled to the USA to become a guest lecturer at Abraham Flexner's newly founded Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Einstein once again renounced his German citizenship and applied for permanent residency in the United States.
The United States was not entirely a safe haven for Einstein, however. The Federal Bureau of Investigation's file on him grew to 1,427 pages. Many of the documents in the file were sent to the FBI by U.S. citizens, some objecting to his immigration and others asking the FBI to protect him. Einstein did became an American citizen in 1940, although he retained Swiss citizenship.
The Einstein family bought a house in Princeton (where Elsa died in 1936), and Einstein remained an integral contributor to the Institute for Advanced Study until his death in 1955. During the 1930s and into World War II Einstein wrote affidavits recommending United States visas for a huge number of Europeans, raised money for Zionist organizations and was in part responsible for the formation, in 1933, of the International Rescue Committee which, to this day, gives support and shelter to refugees of social and political persecution.
Meanwhile, a campaign to eliminate Einstein's work from the German lexicon as unacceptable "Jewish physics" was led by Nobel laureates Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark. Deutsche Physik activists published pamphlets and even textbooks denigrating Einstein; instructors who taught his theories were blacklisted, including Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg who had debated quantum probability with Bohr and Einstein. Einstein's scientific papers were among those destroyed in public book burnings on May 10, 1933.
In 1939, Leo SzilÃ¡rd and Einstein wrote a letter to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning that the Third Reich might be developing nuclear weapons based on their own research. Roosevelt formed a committee to investigate the matter and granted Enrico Fermi's University of Chicago neutron experiments $6,000, the first steps to the Manhattan Project. According to chemist and author Linus Pauling, Einstein later expressed regret about the SzilÃ¡rd-Einstein letter. Within five years the United States created its own nuclear weapons, and used them on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima but never against the Third Reich.
Zionism
Despite his years of Zionist efforts, Einstein publicly stated reservations about the proposal to partition the UK-supervised British Mandate of Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish countries. In a 1938 speech, "Our Debt to Zionism", he said: "I am afraid of the inner damage Judaism will sustain - especially from the development of a narrow nationalism within our own ranks, against which we have already had to fight strongly, even without a Jewish state".
The United Nations did divide the mandate, demarcating the borders of several new countries including the State of Israel, and war broke out immediately. Einstein was one of the authors of a 1948 letter to the New York Times criticizing Menachem Begin's Revisionist Tnuat Haherut ("Freedom Party") for the Deir Yassin massacre.
Einstein served on the Board of Governors of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, built in 1918. The Board had also included psychologist Sigmund Freud and philosopher Martin Buber, as well as chemist Chaim Weizmann who became the first President of Israel. Einstein bequeathed all his papers to the university, where they are held in the Albert Einstein Archives.
When Weizmann died in 1952, Einstein was asked to be Israel's second president. He declined, writing: "I am deeply moved by the offer from our State of Israel, and at once saddened and ashamed that I cannot accept it."
When he was a visible figure working against the rise of Nazism, Einstein had sought help and developed working relationships in both the West and what was to become the Soviet Block. After World War II enmity between the former allies became a serious issue for people with international resumes, especially in the United States. During the first days of McCarthyism Einstein was writing about a single world government; it was at this time that he wrote, "I do not know how the third World War will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." In a 1949 article entitled "Why Socialism?", Albert Einstein described what he called the "predatory phase of human development", exemplified by a chaotic capitalist society, a source of evil to be overcome. With Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell, Einstein lobbied to stop nuclear testing and future bombs. Days before his death, Einstein signed the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, which led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Einstein has been quoted as saying "Racism is America's greatest disease."
Einstein was a member of several civil rights groups, including the Princeton chapter of the NAACP. He served as co-chair with Paul Robeson of the American Crusade to End Lynching. When the aged W.E.B. DuBois was accused of being a communist spy, Einstein volunteered as a character witness and the case was dismissed shortly afterward. Einstein's friendship with the activist Paul Robeson lasted more than 20 years.
In 1946, Einstein collaborated with Rabbi Israel Goldstein, Middlesex heir C. Ruggles Smith, and activist attorney George Alpert on the Albert Einstein Foundation for Higher Learning, Inc., which was formed to create a Jewish-sponsored secular university, open to all students, on the grounds of the former Middlesex College in Waltham, Massachusetts. Middlesex was chosen in part because it was accessible from both Boston and New York City, Jewish cultural centers of the U.S.A. Their vision was a university "deeply conscious both of the Hebraic tradition of Torah looking upon culture as a birthright, and of the American ideal of an educated democracy." The collaboration was stormy, however. Einstein wanted to appoint British economist Harold J. Laski as the university's president, but Alpert wrote that Laski was "a man utterly alien to American principles of democracy, tarred with the Communist brush."
On June 22, 1947, Einstein withdrew his support and barred the use of his name. The university opened in 1948 as Brandeis University. In 1953, Brandeis offered Einstein an honorary degree but he declined.
On April 17, 1955, Albert Einstein experienced internal bleeding caused by the rupture of an aortic aneurism. He took a draft of a speech he was preparing for a television appearance commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary with him to the hospital, but he did not live long enough to complete it. The Hebrew University has the last statement he wrote. He died in Princeton Hospital early the next morning at the age of 76, leaving his Generalized Theory of Gravitation incomplete. In accordance with his wishes he was cremated without ceremony in Trenton, New Jersey and his ashes were scattered at an undisclosed location.
Before the cremation, Princeton Hospital pathologist Thomas Stoltz Harvey removed Einstein's brain for preservation, in hope that the neuroscience of the future would be able to discover what made Einstein so intelligent.
While travelling, Einstein had written daily to his wife Elsa and adopted stepdaughters, Margot and Ilse, and the letters were included in the papers he bequeathed to The Hebrew University. Margot Einstein permitted the personal letters to be made available to the public, but requested that it not be done until twenty years after her death. Barbara Wolff, of the The Hebrew University's Albert Einstein Archives, told the BBC that there are about 3,500 pages of private correspondence written between 1912 and 1955. In letters to Elsa Einstein described being showered with wanted and unwanted attention from women, and that his son Eduard's schizophrenia troubled him. In 1924, regarding Margot, he told her: "I love her as much as if she were my own daughter, perhaps even more so, since who knows what kind of brat she would have become [had I fathered her]."
The United States' National Academy of Sciences commissioned the "Albert Einstein Memorial", a monumental bronze and marble sculpture by Robert Berks, at its Washington, D.C. campus, adjacent to the National Mall.
Einstein bequeathed his estate, as well as the use of his image to The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Einstein supported the university during his life and his support continues with royalties. The Roger Richman Agency licences the commercial use of his name and associated imagery, as agent for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. As of May, 2005, the Roger Richman Agency is owned by Corbis.
In 1999, Albert Einstein was named "Person of the Century" by TIME magazine, the Gallup Poll recorded him as the fourth most admired person of the 20th century[citation needed] and according the 1978 "A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History", Einstein is "the greatest scientist of the twentieth century and one of the supreme intellects of all time".
A partial list of his memorials:
* The International Union of Pure and Applied Physics named 2005 the World Year of Physics in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Annus Mirabilis Papers. * The "Albert Einstein Memorial", a monumental bronze sculpture by Robert Berks in Washington, D.C., adjacent to the National Mall. * a unit used in photochemistry, the einstein * the chemical element 99, einsteinium * the asteroid 2001 Einstein * the Albert Einstein Award * the Albert Einstein Peace Prize
On Einstein's 72nd birthday in 1951, UPI photographer Arthur Sasse was trying to persuade him to smile for the camera; having smiled for photographers many times that day, Einstein stuck out his tongue instead.
Australian film maker Yahoo Serious used the birthday photograph as inspiration for his movie Young Einstein, indeed, Albert Einstein has been the subject of or inspiration for many novels, films and plays. For a sample of them, see Jean-Claude Carrier's 2005 French novel, Einstein S'il Vous Plait ("Please, Mr Einstein"), Nicolas Roeg's film Insignificance, Fred Schepisi's film I.Q. (where he was portrayed by Walter Matthau), Alan Lightman's collection of short stories Einstein's Dreams, and Steve Martin's comedic play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. He was the subject of Philip Glass's groundbreaking 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach and his humorous side is the subject of Ed Metzger's one-man play Albert Einstein: The Practical Bohemian.
Einstein is a favorite model for depictions of mad scientists and absent-minded professors; his expressive face and distinctive hairstyle have been widely copied and exaggerated. TIME magazine's Frederic Golden once said that Einstein was "a cartoonist's dream come true."
Einstein is often credited with having made statements or done things when there is no evidence that he actually did. To add your findings to the list, please go to the article on "things Albert Einstein did not say".