Albert Einstein entered the world in the German city of Ulm to a middle-class Jewish family running an electrical equipment business. Nothing in his early childhood, marked by a slow start in speaking, foreshadowed the revolution in physics he would later unleash with relativity and the photoelectric effect, work that reshaped humanity's understanding of space, time, and light.
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, at 11:30 in the morning, in a rented apartment in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg. His father Hermann ran an electrochemical factory with his uncle Jakob; his mother Pauline played piano and instilled in him an early love of music. Family legend holds that his head was so unusually large and misshapen at birth that his grandmother worried he might not be normal.
He was slow to talk, prompting concern from his parents, and did not speak fluently until around age seven, leading a family maid to nickname him 'the dopey one.' Yet by his teenage years he had already taught himself calculus and devoured Euclidean geometry, later calling a childhood gift of a compass one of the experiences that awakened his sense of wonder about the hidden order of nature.
The coincidence of his birthdate with Pi Day, a numerical celebration invented in 1988 by physicist Larry Shaw at San Francisco's Exploratorium, became a beloved bit of trivia; Einstein himself likely never celebrated it. He died on April 18, 1955, having transformed physics twice over, first with special and general relativity, then with the quantum insight that won him the 1921 Nobel Prize.