14. Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein, born in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany on March 14, 1879, is widely recognized as one of the greatest intellects in human history. He dedicated his life to the field of physics and developed his theories of special and general relativity, winning the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Einstein formulated arguably the most famous equation in scientific history – E=mc2 (Energy=mass times the speed of light, squared) which postulated that the energy of a quantity of matter is equal to the product of its mass and the square of the velocity of light.
Einstein left Germany in 1933 after Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. He emigrated to the United States and took up a position at the new Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 1939, Einstein was informed by Danish atomic physicist, Niels Bohr, that a German refugee physicist named Lise Meitner had “split the uranium atom.” Einstein feared that this research could lead to the Germans developing a nuclear weapon. With the Second World War looming, Einstein wrote to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt warning him of this possibility. It ultimately led to the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons (Einstein was not involved in this research).
Einstein spent the rest of his life formulating unified field theory at Princeton. On April 17, 1955, at the age of 76, Einstein suffered an abdominal aortic aneurysm. While at hospital Einstein refused surgery and reportedly said that he was ready to die – “I want to go when I want, it is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” Einstein passed away the following morning at the University Medical Center at Princeton.
The pathologist who performed Einstein’s autopsy, Thomas Stoltz Harvey, removed and kept Einstein’s brain without the family’s permission. Several days later, Harvey managed to persuade Einstein’s son, Hans Albert to allow him to keep his father’s brain for further research. Over four decades after Einstein’s death, Canadian scientists carried out a study on Einstein’s brain. They found that Einstein’s parietal lobe – the area of the brain responsible for the processing of “spatial relationships, 3D visualization, and mathematical thought was 15 percent wider than in people of normal intelligence.”