Physicist; born in Ulm, Germany. He was an undistinguished student in Germany, but flourished at a high school near Zurich, Switzerland. He requested Swiss citizenship in 1901 and took a post with the Swiss patent office (1902--5). By the time he received his Ph.D. (1905), he had achieved world fame for his publications on Brownian movement of molecules, his photoelectric theory that light and other radiation can behave as both waves and particles, and for his revolutionary special theory of relativity, which related matter and energy in the famous equation, E=Mcv2.