Albert Einstein, perhaps the greatest mind ever to have walked the face of the earth, was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. As a boy, he hated school, and felt that the regimented and repetitive nature of schooling in Germany at that time had any promise of helping his future. He did not do well in school, mainly because he did not care to learn what was being taught to him. While he seemed to be a bright child, his schoolwork did not interest him, but at the same time the simple compass that his father owned fascinated him. Albert constantly harassed his father and his Uncle Jake with questions concerning how the compass worked, and what caused it to work. The answers about gravitation and magnetism kept him up at nights as he attempted to obtain a better grasp of the meaning of these concepts. After hearing of his fascination with these scientific concepts, Max Talmey, a family friend, lent young Einstein books on mathematics and natural science. Upon reading these books, Albert was hooked. From that time on, he was constantly reading about science, geometry, and other areas of math.Even with his newfound knowledge, school was still not interesting, and it was actually worse than it had been before. Now, along with his dislike of the teaching methods, his classmates disliked him for being somewhat of a loner, and because he was so much more intelligent than any of them. His lone passion outside of science was playing the violin, which he continued to do throughout his life. His love of the violin stemmed from his love of classical music, which his mother encouraged him to listen to. But because of his difficulties associating with his teachers and fellow students, he dropped out of school at the age of fifteen. Two years later, however, he was back in school at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, a place that would continue to have a profound effect on his life. Even this did not come easily for him. He failed th...
