Birth: March 14, 1879
Birth Place: Ulm, Kingdom of Wurttemberg in Germany
Religion/Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish
Field: Physics
Schooling and College years: Attended the Catholic Elementary School in Munich, in his teens he attended the Luitpold Gymnasium. Graduated from the Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, Switzerland in 1900 with a diploma in physics and mathematics.
Key Achievements: Special relativity, General relativity, Photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, Bose-Einstein Statistics.
Notable Honors: Nobel Prize in Physics awarded in 1921, The Copley medal in 1925 for his contributions to quantum theory and for his theory of relativity, the Max Planck medal in 1929 for his achievements in Physics.
Death: 18 April, 1955 at the age of 76 in Princeton, New Jersey, USA
(Image, top left: Photograph of Albert Einstein, credit: Oren Jack Turner, Princeton, N.J. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_Head_Cleaned_N_Cropped.jpg)
Here are some Interesting facts about Albert Einstein and his notable contributions in the field of physics and astronomy:
• Albert Einstein was a genius in physics and mathematics. He published his first scientific work “The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields" in 1894, when he was just 15 years old.
• Einstein totally dismissed the “Old Physics” which believed in an absolute space and time and that the speed of light was relative. He envisaged a universe where the speed of light is absolute and space and time are relative.
• Einstein was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in the year 1921 for his discovery of the law of the Photoelectric effect and his services for theoretical physics.
• In 1905, he published four research papers, the special theory of relativity, the Brownian motion theory, the photon theory of light, and the equivalence of mass and energy. The basis of special theory of relativity is that the velocity of light was absolute, albeit, all other velocities are relative.
• Exactly ten years later in 1915, Einstein published a research paper called “general relativity”. This theory gives the current meaning 
of gravitation in modern physics. The research paper explained gravity as a property of space-time. The general theory of relativity unifies Newton’s law of gravity and special relativity. The theory produced some of the greatest and strangest results in modern astronomy.
•In 1916, Einstein introduced the notion of dark energy. He called it the “energy of nothing”. The energy of nothing is Einstein’s cosmological constant, which was added to his general theory of relativity. However, he later refuted his own idea by calling it his greatest blunder. “But, his great blunder holds the destiny of universe” says Michio Kaku, author of Parallel Worlds. According to Alexey Vikhlinin, lead researcher in the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “dark energy is the cosmological constant, or in simple terms: ‘nothing weighs something’. Modern cosmologists estimate that almost 70 percent of universe is dark energy, five percent ordinary matter and 25 percent dark matter. (Sources: Sciencentral.com and Wired.com).
• In 1905 he published the paper on mass-energy equivalence, which gave twentieth century’s most famous equation E=MC2. The equation means that small amounts of mass could be converted into huge amounts of energy. It was the basis of development of nuclear power.
• Einstein did not believe in the wave theory of light. He stressed more on the particle theory of light and believed that light is a collection of particles, not waves.
• Much of his later life was spent in search for a unified field theory, but he was unsuccessful in providing substantial evidence on it.
• He showed us how to calculate the Avogadro’s number and the size of molecules.
(Image, Top, Left: Photograph of the young Albert Einstein, courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Einstein_as_a_child.jpg)
(Image, Right: A photograph of the 42-year old Einstein, photograph by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1870-1928), courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein1921_by_F_Schmutzer_4.jpg)