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Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist who transformed our understanding of space, time and energy. He is best known for developing the theories of special and general relativity and for the mass–energy equivalence E = mc2, a formula often called "the world's most famous equation." He also made influential contributions to quantum theory and received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect.

Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895 and renounced his German citizenship the following year. At seventeen he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zurich in 1897, graduating in 1900; he became a Swiss citizen in 1901. After securing a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich in 1905.

In 1905—his annus mirabilis—Einstein published four groundbreaking papers outlining the photoelectric effect, explaining Brownian motion, introducing special relativity, and demonstrating mass–energy equivalence. He expanded his ideas in 1915 with the general theory of relativity and, in a 1916 paper, introduced the cosmological constant while taking the first steps toward modern theoretical cosmology. In 1917 he described spontaneous and stimulated emission, a foundation for lasers and further advances in quantum electrodynamics and quantum optics.

Einstein's middle career included major advances in statistical mechanics and the quantum theory of radiation, introducing the photon concept and, with Satyendra Nath Bose, laying the groundwork for Bose–Einstein statistics. He moved to Berlin in 1914 to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and Humboldt University, became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in 1917, and regained German citizenship. Visiting the United States in 1933 as Hitler rose to power, he remained there, was granted American citizenship in 1940, and endorsed a letter to President Roosevelt urging research into potential German nuclear weapons—research later carried out as the Manhattan Project. Late in life he opposed quantum randomness (famously saying "God does not play dice") and pursued a unified field theory; those efforts were not successful and left him increasingly isolated from mainstream physics. Many things bear his name, including the element einsteinium, and in 1999 he was named Time's Person of the Century.