Youth and schooling

Albert Einstein was born into a Jewish family in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman. His mother was Pauline Einstein, (née 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.[4] Thomas Sowell used Einstein's name for a book on such children.[5]

In 1880, the family moved to Munich where his father and his uncle founded a company, 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,[6] 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").[6] 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".[7] 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 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH), 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.)[8] 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 ETH. On February 21, 1901, he gained Swiss citizenship, which he never revoked. [9] Marie moved to Olsberg, Switzerland for a teaching post.

In 1896, Mileva Marić also enrolled at ETH, the only woman studying Mathematics. During the next few years Einstein and Marić's friendship developed into romance. Einstein's mother objected because she thought Marić too old, not Jewish and "physically defective".[10] Einstein and Marić 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 Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena"), on the capillary forces of a straw [11]. He graduated from ETH with a teaching diploma.