Einstein was borin in Ulm, Germany, March 14, 1879. Shortly after his birth his family moved to Munich and set up a business there.
As a child Einstein showed little scholastic abilities, at the age of 15 he had poor grades in History, Geography, and Languages.
His family moved again, he resumed his education in Switzerland, this led to four years of Physics and Mathematics at the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich.
Einstein graduated in spring of 1900, and became a Swiss citizen. He worked as a math teacher for two months, then went to work at a Swiss patent office in Berne.
Five years earlier Einstein wrote "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," the special theory of relativity.
General belief at the time was that light, when it traveled against the flow of ether, an all-pervading medium through which light flows (which hadn't been proven, it was just accepted at the time), it would be slowed down. Thus if you were in a moving vehicle, and you clocked the time it took a flash of light to reach from one side to the other (front to back) and then measured it going the other way, the difference would show that you were moving.
Einstein didn't believe this. Einstein said that the speed of light was always constant.
In his fourth published paper, a footnote to the special relativity, Einstein gave us his now famous equation, E = mc2, which showes the equivalence of energy and mass. It would take time for the public to understand this theory.
In 1916, Einstein's "The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity," he stated that gravity was not the force that Newton said it was, but a curved field in the space-time continuum, which is created by the presence of mass. A good was to picture this is a bowling ball set on a trampoline. The surface of the trampoline in the vicinity of the ball is depressed. This represents the curved field of space-time. If a golf ball is rolled past this bowling ball, it rolls around it, not because of a force given off by the bowling ball, but from the depression caused by the bowling ball.
Einstein said that this could be proved or disproved by measuring the deflection of starlight travelling close by the sun, during an eclipse. In order to find out, he would have to wait till the end of World War I.
Einstein's predictions were verified by the Royal Society of London on November of 1919. Because of this Einstein was acclaimed the greatest genius on Earth. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1921 for "your work in photoelectic law and your work in the field of theoretical physics."
After this time Einstein went after the unified field theory, which would explain all matter and energy in the universe, to fit it all into one equation. His first version in 1929 wasn't fully accepted, his 1950 version was criticized politely and was said to be incapable of being maintained or defended.
Einstein never found the equation he was looking for. He died on April 18, 1955, in his sleep.
Although he didn't find that equation, I admire him for not giving up on his goal.
References
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Great Events of the 20th Century