vincent-van-gogh

Vincent van Gogh

Birth Year : 1853
Death Year : 1890
Country : Netherlands

Vincent van Gogh, for whom color was the chief symbol of expression, was born in Groot-Zundert, Holland. The son of a pastor, brought up in a religious and cultured atmosphere, Vincent was highly emotional and lacked self-confidence. Between 1860 and 1880, when he

finally decided to become an artist, van Gogh had had two unsuitable and unhappy romances and had worked unsuccessfully as a clerk in a bookstore, an art salesman, and a preacher in the Borinage (a dreary mining district in Belgium), where he was dismissed for overzealousness. He remained in Belgium to study art, determined to give happiness by creating beauty. The works of his early Dutch period are somber-toned, sharply lit, genre paintings of which the most famous is "The Potato Eaters" (1885). In that year van Gogh went to Antwerp where he discovered the works of Rubens and purchased many Japanese prints.

In 1886 he went to Paris to join his brother Théo, the manager of Goupil's gallery. In Paris, van Gogh studied with Cormon, inevitably met Pissarro, Monet, and Gauguin, and began to lighten his very dark palette and to paint in the short brushstrokes of the Impressionists. His nervous temperament made him a difficult companion and night-long discussions combined with painting all day undermined his health. He decided to go south to Arles where he hoped his friends would join him and help found a school of art. Gauguin did join him but with disastrous results. In a fit of epilepsy, van Gogh pursued his friend with an open razor, was stopped by Gauguin, but ended up cutting a portion of his ear lobe off. Van Gogh then began to alternate between fits of madness and lucidity and was sent to the asylum in Saint-Remy for treatment.

In May of 1890, he seemed much better and went to live in Auvers-sur-Oise under the watchful eye of Dr. Gachet. Two months later he was dead, having shot himself "for the good of all." During his brief career he had sold one painting. Van Gogh's finest works were produced in less than three years in a technique that grew more and more impassioned in brushstroke, in symbolic and intense color, in surface tension, and in the movement and vibration of form and line. Van Gogh's inimitable fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional, for the artist was completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature.

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Mao zedong

Mao zedong

Mao Zedong was born in 1893 and he died in 1976. Mao Zedong is considered to be the father of Communist China and along side Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek played a fundamental part in China's recent history.

Mao was born in Chaochan in Hunan province. He came from a peasant family. As with all peasants living in Nineteenth Century China, his upbringing was hard and he experienced no luxuries.

He first encountered Marxism while he worked as a library assistant at Peking University. In 1921, he co-founded the Chinese Communist Party. Mao gave a geographic slant to Marxism as he felt that within an Asiatic society, communists had to concentrate on the countryside rather than the industrial towns. In reality, this was a logical belief as China had very little industry but many millions involved with agriculture. Mao believed that a revolutionary elite would only be found in the peasantry and not among those who worked in towns.

With Zhou Enlai, Mao established a revolutionary base on the border of Hunan. In 1931, Mao set up a Chinese Soviet republic in Kiangsi. This lasted until 1934 when Mao and his followers were forced to leave Kiangsi and head for Shensi in the legendary Long March which lasted to 1935. Here they were relatively safe from the Kuomintang lead by Chiang Kai-shek but far removed from the real seat of power in China – Peking (Beijing).

From 1937 to 1945, the enmity between the KMT and the Communists was put to one side as both concentrated their resources on the Japanese who had launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937. It was during this time that Mao developed his knowledge about guerrilla warfare that he was to use with great effect in the civil war against the KMT once the war with Japan had ended in 1945.

By the spring of 1948, Mao switched from guerrilla attacks to full-scale battles. The KMT had been effectively broken by the skill of Mao’s guerrilla tactics and defeat was not long in coming. In October 1949, Mao was appointed Chairman of the People’s Republic of China.

He governed a country that was many years behind the world’s post-war powers. China’s problems were huge and Mao decided to introduce radical solutions for China’s domestic weaknesses rather than rely on conservative ones.

From 1950 on Mao introduced land reforms and the first Five Year Plan started in 1953. Peasant co-operatives were set up. In 1958, the Great Leap Forward was introduced as were the first land communes. Though he used the term "Five Year Plan", Mao did not accept the theory that all ideas had to start with Russia and China would have to follow. In fact, Mao remained very independent of Russia and publicly criticised the rule of Khrushchev when he became leader of Russia.

In 1959, Mao gave up the position of head of state. This went to Liu Shao-chi. He did remain party chairman and concentrated his efforts on ideological changes. From 1960 to 1965, a struggle took place between Liu and Mao over who were the more important - the industrial workers or the peasants. Mao still placed his faith in the peasants. Liu favoured the urban workers.

This clash formed the background to the Cultural Revolution of 1966 when Mao openly and successfully sided with the peasants. Mao had sheer numbers on his side as China was still an agricultural nation despite exploding an atomic bomb in 1964. From 1966 on, some essays by Mao entitled "Thoughts" became all but compulsory reading for Chinese people – especially the young who Mao actively courted. This was to become Mao’s famous "Little Red Book".

Mao continually proved to the Chinese that he was fit to lead them by swimming miles down the Yangste River each year. He remained leader of China in the later years of his life though Zhou Enlai did much of the foreign policy work.

Mao’s death in 1976, plunged China into national grief.

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LeonTrotsky

Leon Trotsky (1879 - 1940)

Trotsky was a key figure in the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia, second only to Lenin in the early stage of Soviet communist rule. However, he lost out to Stalin in the power struggle that followed Lenin's death, and was assassinated while in exile.

Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein on 7 November 1879 in Yanovka, Ukraine, then part of Russia. His father was a prosperous Jewish farmer. Trotsky became involved in underground activities as a teenager. He was soon arrested, jailed and exiled to Siberia where he joined the Social Democratic Party. Eventually, he escaped and spent the majority of the next 15 years abroad, including a spell in London.

In 1903 the Social Democrats split. While Lenin assumed leadership of the Bolshevik faction, Trotsky became a Menshevik and developed his theory of 'permanent revolution'. After the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd in February 1917, he made his way back to Russia. Despite previous disagreements with Lenin, Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks and played a decisive role in the communist take-over of power the same year. His first post in the new government was as foreign commissar, where he found himself negotiating peace terms with Germany. He was then made war commissar and in this capacity, built up the Red Army which prevailed against the White forces in the Civil War. Thus Trotsky played a crucial role in keeping the Bolshevik regime alive. He saw himself as Lenin's heir apparent but his intellectual arrogance made him few friends, and his Jewish background may also have worked against him. When Lenin fell ill and died, Trotsky was easily outmanoeuvred by Stalin. In 1927, he was thrown out of the party. Internal and then foreign exile followed but Trotsky continued to write and to criticise Stalin.

In 1936, Trotsky settled in Mexico. On 20 August 1940 Ramon Mercader, who was acting on Stalin's order, stabbed Trotsky with an ice pick. He died the next day.

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Josep stalin

Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953)

The man who turned the Soviet Union from a backward country into a world superpower at unimaginable human cost. Stalin was born into a dysfunctional family in a poor village in Georgia. Permanently scarred from a childhood bout with smallpox and having a mildly deformed arm, Stalin always felt unfairly treated by life, and thus developed a strong, romanticized desire for greatness and respect, combined with a shrewd streak of calculating cold-heartedness towards those who had maligned him. He always felt a sense of inferiority before educated intellectuals, and particularly distrusted them.

Sent by his mother to the seminary in Tiflis (now Tbilisi), the capital of Georgia, to study to become a priest, the young Stalin never completed his education, and was instead soon completely drawn into the city's active revolutionary circles. Never a fiery intellectual polemicist or orator like Lenin or Trotsky, Stalin specialized in the humdrum nuts and bolts of revolutionary activity, risking arrest every day by helping organize workers, distributing illegal literature, and robbing trains to support the cause, while Lenin and his bookish friends lived safely abroad and wrote clever articles about the plight of the Russian working class. Although Lenin found Stalin's boorishness offensive at times, he valued his loyalty, and appointed him after the Revolution to various low-priority leadership positions in the new Soviet government.

In 1922, Stalin was appointed to another such post, as General Secretary of the Communist Party's Central Committee. Stalin understood that "cadres are everything": if you control the personnel, you control the organization. He shrewdly used his new position to consolidate power in exactly this way--by controlling all appointments, setting agendas, and moving around Party staff in such a way that eventually everyone who counted for anything owed their position to him. By the time the Party's intellectual core realized what had happened, it was too late--Stalin had his (mostly mediocre) people in place, while Lenin, the only person with the moral authority to challenge him, was on his deathbed and incapable of speech after a series of strokes, and besides, Stalin even controlled who had access to the leader. The General Secretary of the Party became the de facto leader of the country right on up until Mikhail Gorbachev.

After Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin methodically went about destroying all the old leaders of the Party, taking advantage of their weakness for standing on arcane intellectual principle to simply divide and conquer them. At first, these people were removed from their posts and exiled abroad. Later, when he realized that their sharp tongues and pens were still capable of inveighing against him even from far away, Stalin switched tactics, culminating in a vast reign of terror and spectacular show trials in the 1930s during which the founding fathers of the Soviet Union were one by one unmasked as "enemies of the people" who had supposedly always been in the employ of Capitalist intelligence services and summarily shot. The particularly pesky Leon Trotsky, who continued to badger Stalin from Mexico City after his exile in 1929, had to be silenced once and for all with an ice pick in 1940. The purges, or "repressions" as they are known in Russia, extended far beyond the Party elite, reaching down into every local Party cell and nearly all of the intellectual professions, since anyone with a higher education was suspected of being a potential counterrevolutionary. This depleted the Soviet Union of its brainpower, and left Stalin as the sole intellectual force in the country--an expert on virtually every human endeavor.

Driven by his own sense of inferiority, which he projected onto his country as a whole, Stalin pursued an economic policy of mobilizing the entire country to achieve the goal of rapid industrialization, so that it could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Capitalist powers. To this end, he forcefully collectivized agriculture (one of the Bolsheviks' key policy stances in 1917 was to give the land to the peasants; collectivization took it back from them and effectively reduced them to the status of serfs again), instituted the Five-Year Plans to coordinate all investment and production in the country, and undertook a massive program of building heavy industry. Although the Soviet Union boasted that its economy was booming while the Capitalist world was experiencing the Great Depression, and its industrialization drive did succeed in rapidly creating an industrial infrastructure where there once had been none, the fact is that all this was done at exorbitant cost in human lives. Measures such as the violent expropriation of the harvest by the government, the forced resettlement and murder of the most successful peasants as counterrevolutionary elements, and the discovery of a source of cheap labor through the arrest of millions of innocent citizens led to countless millions of deaths from the worst man-made famine in human history and in the camps of the Gulag.

As war clouds were gathering on the horizon in 1939, Stalin felt that he had scored a coup by striking a non-aggression pact with Hitler, in which they agreed to divide up Poland and then leave each other alone. Stalin so strongly believed that he and Hitler had an understanding that he refused to listen to his military advisors' warnings in 1941 that the Wehrmacht was massing for an attack, and purged any one who dared utter such blasphemy. As a result, when the attack came, the Soviet army was completely unprepared and suffered horrible defeats, while Stalin spent the first several days after the attack holed up in his office in shock. Because the military had been purged of its best minds in the mid-1930s, it took some time, and many lives, before the Soviets were able to regroup and make a credible defense. By then, all of the Ukraine and Belarus were in German hands, Leningrad had been surrounded and besieged, and Nazi artillery was entrenched only a few miles from the Kremlin. After heroic efforts on the part of the whole country, the tide eventually turned at Stalingrad in 1943, and soon the victorious Red Army was liberating the countries of Eastern Europe--before the Americans had even begun to pose a serious challenge to Hitler from the west with the D-Day invasion.

During the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam Conferences, Stalin proved a worthy negotiator with the likes of Roosevelt and Churchill, and managed to arrange for the countries of Eastern Europe, which had been liberated by the Red Army to remain in the Soviet sphere of influence, as well as securing three seats for his country in the newly formed UN. The Soviet Union was now a recognized world superpower, with its own permanent seat on the Security Council, and the respect that Stalin had craved all his life. Still, he was not finished. Returning soldiers and refugees were arrested and either shot or sent to the labor camps as traitors, entire nationalities that had been deported during the War, also as traitors, were not allowed to return to their homes, and in 1953, a plot to kill Stalin was ostensibly uncovered in the Kremlin itself. A new purge seemed imminent, and was cut short only by Stalin's death. He remained a hero to his people until Khrushchev's well-known "secret" speech to a Party Congress in 1956, in which Stalin's excesses, at least as far as power grabbing in the Party itself, were denounced.

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Alfred nobel

Alfred Nobel (1833-1896)

Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist and the inventor of dynamite, who established the Nobel Prize.

Alfred Nobel was born on 21 October 1833 in Stockholm, Sweden. His father was an engineer and inventor. In 1842, Nobel's family moved to Russia where his father had opened an engineering firm providing equipment for the Tsar's armies. In 1850, Nobel's father sent him abroad to study chemical engineering. During a two-year period Nobel visited Sweden, Germany, France and the United States. He returned to Sweden in 1863 with his father after the family firm went bankrupt.

Back in Sweden, Nobel devoted himself to the study of explosives. He was particularly interested in the safe manufacture and use of nitro-glycerine, a highly unstable explosive. Nobel's brother Emil had been killed in a nitro-glycerine explosion in 1864. Nobel incorporated nitro-glycerine into silica, an inert substance, which made it safer and easier to manipulate. This he patented in 1867 under the name of 'dynamite'. Dynamite established Nobel's fame and was soon used in blasting tunnels, cutting canals and building railways and roads all over the world. Nobel went on to invent a number of other explosives.

In the 1870s and 1880s, Nobel built up a network of factories all over Europe to manufacture explosives. In 1894 he bought an ironworks at Bofors in Sweden that became the nucleus of the well-known Bofors arms factory. Although he lived in Paris, Nobel travelled widely. He continued to work in his laboratory, inventing a number of synthetic materials and by the time of his death he had 355 patents.

In November 1895, Nobel signed his will providing for the establishment of the Nobel Prizes. He set aside the bulk of his huge fortune to establish annual prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. An Economics Prize was added later.

Nobel died at his home in Italy on 10 December 1896. He is buried in Stockholm.

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billgates

William (Bill) H. Gates

born October 28, 1955

William H. Gates
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation
William (Bill) H. Gates III is co-founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft Corporation, the world's leading provider of software for personal computers.

Bill Gates was born on October 28, 1955. He and his two sisters grew up in Seattle. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Mary Gates, their late mother, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent and chairwoman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school before moving on to the private Lakeside School in North Seattle. It was at Lakeside that Gates began his career in personal computer software, programming computers at age 13.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, who is now Microsoft's president. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. BASIC was first developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960s. In his junior year, Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote his energies full-time to Microsoft, a company he had started in 1975 with his boyhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the personal computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers.

Gates' foresight and vision regarding personal computing have been central to the success of Microsoft and the software industry. Gates is actively involved in key management and strategic decisions at Microsoft, and plays an important role in the technical development of new products. Much of his time is devoted to meeting with customers and staying in contact with Microsoft employees around the world through e-mail.

Under Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission is continuously to advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, more cost-effective and more enjoyable for people to use computers. The company is committed to a long-term view, which is reflected in its investment of some $2.6 billion for research and development during the current fiscal year.

In 1995 Gates wrote The Road Ahead, his vision of where information technology will take society. Co-authored by Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's chief technology officer, and Peter Rinearson, The Road Ahead held the No. 1 spot on the New York Times' bestseller list for seven weeks, and remained on the list for a total of 18 weeks. Published in more than 20 countries, the book sold more than 400,000 copies in China alone.

In 1996, while strategically redeploying Microsoft to take advantage of the emerging opportunities created by the Internet, Gates thoroughly revised The Road Ahead to reflect his view that interactive networks are a major milestone in human communication. The paperback second edition also has become a bestseller. Gates is donating his proceeds from the book to a non-profit fund that supports teachers worldwide who are incorporating computers into their classrooms.

In addition to his passion for computers, Gates is interested in biotechnology. He sits on the board of the ICOS Corporation and is a shareholder in Chiroscience Group of the United Kingdom and its wholly owned subsidiary, Chiroscience R&D Inc. (formerly Darwin Molecular) of Bothell, Wash. He also founded Corbis Corporation, which is developing one of the largest resources of visual information in the world - a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe. Gates also has invested with cellular telephone pioneer Craig McCaw in Teledesic, a company that is working on an ambitious plan to launch hundreds of low-orbit satellites around the Earth to provide a worldwide two-way broadband telecommunications service.

In the dozen years since Microsoft went public, Gates has donated more than $800 million to charities, including $200 million to the Gates library Foundation to help libaries in North America take advantage of new technologies and the Information Age. In 1994 Gates established the William H. Gates Foundation, which supports a variety of initiatives of particular interest to Gates and his family. The focus of Gates' philanthropy is in four areas: education; world public health and population; non-profit, civic and arts organizations; and Puget Sound-area capital campaigns.

Bill and Melinda French Gates were married on January 1, 1994. They have now three children, one is Jennifer Katharine Gates, who was born in 1996; and a son Rory John Gates, born in 1999 and a daughter, Phoebe Adelle Gates, born in 2002.

Chronology

In 2000 Gates resignes as CEO of Microsoft to spend more on software architecture and less with running the company

Honors and awards

2-03-2005 Bill Gates knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contribution to the British economy. His titel will be 'Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire'. Thoug he is not allowed to call himself 'Sir' because of his USA citizenship but may suffix his name with KBE.

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bruce lee

bruce lee

In 1959 a short, skinny, bespectacled 18-year-old kid from Hong Kong traveled to America and declared himself to be John Wayne, James Dean, Charles Atlas and the guy who kicked your butt in junior high. In an America where the Chinese were still stereotyped as meek house servants and railroad workers, Bruce Lee was all steely sinew, threatening stare and cocky, pointed finger--a Clark Kent who didn't need to change outfits. He was the redeemer, not only for the Chinese but for all the geeks and dorks and pimpled teenage masses that washed up at the theaters to see his action movies. He was David, with spin-kicks and flying leaps more captivating than any slingshot.

As an exceptional martial artist, Lee's ability to synthesize various national martial techniques sparked a new trend in unarmed combat martial arts films. His talent shifted the focus from martial arts director to martial arts actor.

Since 1973, the year Bruce Lee died and his famous motion picture Enter the Dragon was released, movies have been the single most influential factor behind the growing popularity of martial arts. Lee�s cinematic success spawned a global industry of the martial arts, and schools opened and flourished worldwide. During the 1970s more students took up the study of martial arts than at any time before or since. To those involved in martial arts, the years from 1972 to 1975�the height of Lee�s popularity�are often cited as the Bruce Lee era

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fidal castro

Fidel Castro

Born: 13-Aug-1926
Birthplace: Mayari, Cuba

Gender: Male
Religion: Atheist
Race or Ethnicity: Hispanic
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Head of State

Nationality: Cuba
Executive summary: Dictator of Cuba for almost fifty years

On 26 July 1953, Fidel Castro led about 150 men in an attack on Moncada barracks, the strongest garrison of Fulgencio Batista. Batista was Cuba's dictator then, with friendly relations with the US government. Dozens of Castro's men were killed in battle, and Fidel was charged with treason. At his trial, he delivered an impassioned two-hour closing argument that was widely but clandestinely circulated under the title History will absolve me! It was a kangaroo trial, and Castro was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but a public groundswell called out for amnesty, and Castro was released in 1955. After a brief period of exile in Mexico, Castro's triumphant return came in 1959, when his next attempt at revolution succeeded. The brutal Batista government was overthrown, and replaced by the brutal Castro government.

History will absolve me was rewritten as a blueprint for Castro's communist regime, and American-owned businesses in Cuba were nationalized. Castro kept many of his promises -- Cubans have free health care, education, and a low level of homelessness, but the society has suffered both from the US embargo and the totalitarian regime. Castro's (and thus Cuba's) relations with the US have always been frigid, but became icy after the US-backed "Bay of Pigs" attempted coup in 1962. To this day, Cubans who travel to America without permission risk forced repatriation, and Americans who travel to Cuba without official US approval risk hefty fines.

Castro called himself Prime Minister from 1959-76, and then called himself President, though the change was superficial and he was always utterly autocratic. After intestinal surgery in July 2006, he was rarely seen in public. He temporarily ceded power to his brother, Raúl Castro, on 31 July 2006, and formally stepped down as President on 19 February 2008.

Father: Angel Castro y Argiz (sugar plantation owner)
Mother: Lina Ruz Gonzáles (his father's maid)
Brother: Raúl Castro (co-revolutionary and Fidel's successor)
Wife: Mirta Diaz Balart de Nunez (m. 12-Oct-1948; div. 1954, one son)
Son: Fidel Casro Diaz-Balart Jr. (head of Cuba's atomic energy bureau, b. 1-Sep-1949)
Girlfriend: Natalia "Naty" Revuelta (military cap-maker, b. 1925)
Daughter: Alina Fernandez (b. 1956)

High School: Colegio Belén, Havana, Cuba
Law School: University of Havana (1950)

President of Cuba 1959-2008
Order of Lenin
Lenin Peace Prize 1961
Excommunicated by Pope John XXIII 3-Jan-1962
Converted to Atheism
Assassination Attempt multiple
Pardoned
Treason
Risk Factors: Smoking
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Isacc newton

Isaac Newton (1643 - 1727)

Newton was an English physicist and mathematician and the greatest scientist of his era.

Isaac Newton was born on 4 January 1643 in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire. His father was a prosperous farmer, who died three months before Newton was born. His mother re-married and Newton was left in the care of his grandparents. In 1661, he went to Cambridge University where he became interested in mathematics, optics, physics and astronomy. In October 1665, a plague epidemic forced the university to close and Newton returned to Woolsthorpe. The two years he spent there were an extremely fruitful time during which he began to think about gravity, and also devoted time to optics and mathematics, working out his ideas about 'fluxions' (calculus).

In 1667, Newton returned to Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Trinity College. Two years later he was appointed second Lucasian Professor of Mathematics. It was Newton's reflecting telescope, made in 1668, that finally brought him to the attention of the scientific community and in 1672 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. From the mid-1660s, Newton conducted a series of experiments on the composition of light, discovering that white light is composed of the same system of colours that can be seen in a rainbow and establishing the modern study of optics (or the behaviour of light). In 1704 Newton published 'The Opticks' which dealt with light and colour. He also studied and published works on history, theology and alchemy.

However, in 1687, with the support of his friend the astronomer Edmond Halley, Newton published his single greatest work, the 'Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica' ('Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy'). This showed how a universal force, gravity, applied to all objects in all parts of the universe.

In 1689, Newton was elected MP for Cambridge University (1689 - 1690 and 1701 - 1702). In 1696 Newton was appointed warden of the Royal Mint, settling in London. He took his duties at the Mint very seriously and campaigned against corruption and inefficiency within the organisation. In 1703, he was elected president of the Royal Society, an office he held until his death. He was knighted in 1705.

Newton was a difficult man, prone to depression and often involved in bitter arguments with other scientists, but by the early 1700s he was the dominant figure in British and European science. He died on 31 March 1727 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

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Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Einstein was one of the fathers of the atomic age. He was one of the greatest scientists of all time. In 1905 Einstein contributed three papers to Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics), a German scientific periodical. Each of them became the basis of a new branch of physics.

Einstein treated matter and energy as exchangeable. Albert Einstein became famous for the theory of relativity, which laid the basis for the release of atomic energy.

In 1905 Albert Einstein formulates Special Theory of Relativity.

He established law of mass- energy equivalence; through his famous formula E=mc²

Einstein calculates how the movement of molecules in a liquid can cause the Brownian motion.

Using Max Planck’s quantum Theory he formulated the photon theory of light and explains the photoelectric effect.

In 1916 proposes general theory of relativity-still central to our understanding of the universe. Einstein changed the political balance of power in the twentieth century, through his scientific foundation in the development of atomic energy.

E=mc²

The Theory of Relativity

In his 1905 paper, titled “The Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Einstein presented the special theory of relatively. In this paper, he showed how the theory demonstrated the relativity of time, a previously unimaginable idea.

He advanced the theory of relativity when he was only 26 years old. Einstein’s relativity theory revolutionized scientific thought with new conceptions of time, space, mass, motion, and gravitation.

His famous equation E=mc² (energy equals mass times the velocity of light squared), became the foundation stone in the development of atomic energy.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity

The theory of relatively is founded on the idea that only relative motion can be measured. The consequences of this notion are profound, and shatter the Newtonian conception of the world. Both space and time are no longer absolutes.

Newtonian Mechanics

Isaac Newton codified the mathematical laws of motion and formulated the law of universal gravitation in his famous “Principia” written in the 17th century. The space and time are absolute, universal and independent of motion of bodies in space.

Einstein’s relativity

All motion can be measured only in relation to the observer who performs the measurement. Time and position are all relative to the observer: hence the theory has been called Einstein’s relativity.

Albert Einstein completes his theory of gravitation, known as the general theory of relativity, on Nov. 25, 1915. The theory is submitted to Annalen der Physik on Mar. 20, 1916.

Einstein presented the general theory of relativity to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915.

Einstein and the Total Eclipse

Einstein’s theory is embodied in his famous equation E=mc². Although light photons don’t have mass, they have energy, and Einstein’s theory says that even pure energy has to behave in some ways like mass. Therefore light could be bend by the gravitation force of the sun.

Light from the background stars closely bypassing the sun on the way to the earth are being bend by the sun. The result is that the stars are seen in slightly different positions in the sky when the sun is in front of them, compared to their positions when the sun is elsewhere.

The eclipse of May 29,1919 confirmed Einstein’s theory that the light could be bend by the gravitational force of the sun. An English expedition in the area of the eclipse have actually measured the deflexion of starlight from the sun. The data of the expedition was presented to a special joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society of London on November 6, 1919.

The eminent Professor J.J. Thomson, discoverer of the electron and Chair of the meeting, was convinced: “This is the most important result obtained in connection with the theory of gravitation since Newton’s day.”

Quantum Mechanics

German Physicist Max Planck introduced the quantum theory. Einstein built in on the work of Max Planck. Planck had been working on an effect called black body radiation. The black body does not reflect the light and takes in all the energy of the lighting falling into it. Planck devise an explanation for the black body effect, stating that the light was not continuous energy (continuous waves). Instead, the energy of light existed as a stream of tiny particles, called quanta.

Light behaves like particles and thus can liberate by impact electrons from a metal surface. Later the light particles became known as the Photon. The Maxwell’s electromagnetic waves theory of light could not explain the Photoelectric effect.

The Photoelectric Effect

Using his theory of quanta, Einstein explained the photoelectric effect. He showed that when quanta of light energy strikes atoms in the metal, the quanta force the atoms to release electrons.

Einstein’s work helped justify the quantum theory. The photoelectric cell resulted from Einstein’s work. This device made possible sound motion pictures, television and many other inventions. Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics for his paper on quanta.

The work of Planck and Einstein quickly established the Quantum Theory, not only in light but also in many forms of energy. The quantum physics was born.

The Brownian Movement and The Atomic Theory of Matter

The third Einstein paper of 1905 concerned the movements of tiny particles floating in a liquid or gas. This effect has been seen earlier by the Scottish plant expert Robert Brown. It was renown as Brownian motion. Einstein’s paper on Brownian Motion confirmed the atomic theory of matter. This is viewed by many as the first proof that atoms actually exist.

Einstein’s Biography

Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Württemberg, Germany. After public school in Munich and in Aarau, Switzerland, Einstein studied mathematics and physics at the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. From 1902 to 1909, he worked as an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, Switzerland. Away from work, he continued his discussions on scientific matters with colleages including his first wife Mileva Maric.

Maric and Einstein entered the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zurich in 1896 to study mathematics and physics. Both graduated in 1900.

Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. They had two sons, and one daughter. On May 14, 1904, Mileva gave birth to a boy named Hans Albert. Their daughter Lieserl was born before their marriage and died in childhood.

The families went on holiday to Belgrade in the summer of 1905 and there were trips to Oerland and visits to Albert’s uncle Cäsar and his friends the Wintelers in Aarau as well as college pals in Zurich.

The young Einsteins with their newborn boy visited the Maric family frequently, as the household economy would allow.

Einstein became a Swiss citizen in 1905.

In 1909, he became professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. In 1911 and 1912, he occupied the same position at the German University in Prague.

Einstein was elected to the Prussian Academy of Science in Berlin in 1913. When he accepted the professorship of physics at the University of Berlin in 1914, he once more assumed German citizenship. The same year, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute in Berlin. He occupied both positions until 1933.

After the rise of NAZI in Germany, Einstein left for USA. Einstein and relatives left Europe for the United States, on December 9, 1930.

In 1933, the Nazi government took his property and deprived him of his positions and citizenship. After arriving in California in early 1931, he was later invited to join the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.

Einstein accepted the position. He lived and worked there until his death. In 1940, Einstein became an American citizen. Albert Einstein died in Princeton, New Jersey on April 18, 1955.

Above: Albert Einstein's congratulation letter to Nikola Tesla on his 75th Birthday

Above: Albert Einstein

Above: Manhattan Project New York Times Article (about Einstein)

Above: Einstein's letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt (President of the United States) about the development of the atomic bomb

Above: Atomic Bomb Explosion.

This following below was copied from Manhattan Project - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Manhattan Project was the project to develop the first nuclear weapon (atomic bomb) during World War II by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Formally designated as the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it refers specifically to the period of the project from 1941–1946 under the control of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, under the administration of General Leslie R. Groves. The scientific research was directed by American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The project succeeded in developing and detonating three nuclear weapons in 1945: a test detonation of a plutonium implosion bomb on July 16 (the Trinity test) near Alamogordo, New Mexico; an enriched uranium bomb code-named "Little Boy" on August 6 over Hiroshima, Japan; and a second plutonium bomb, code-named "Fat Man" on August 9 over Nagasaki, Japan.

The project's roots lay in scientists' fears since the 1930s that Nazi Germany was also investigating nuclear weapons of its own. Born out of a small research program in 1939, the Manhattan Project eventually employed more than 130,000 people and cost nearly $2 billion USD ($23 billion in 2007 dollars based on CPI). It resulted in the creation of multiple production and research sites that operated in secret.[1]

The three primary research and production sites of the project were the plutonium-production facility at what is now the Hanford Site, the uranium-enrichment facilities at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the weapons research and design laboratory, now known as Los Alamos National Laboratory. Project research took place at over thirty different sites across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The MED maintained control over U.S. weapons production until the formation of the Atomic Energy Commission in January 1947.

Above: Pupin Physics Laboratory at Columbia University (click here for more details). This building was named after Michael Pupin's death in 1935. 29 American Noble Prize Winners did their research in Pupin Physics Laboratory.

Much of the early research on the Manhattan Project was done at Columbia University in Pupin Hall and at one time employed 700 people on the project. Tons of uranium were stored in warehouses in the Chelsea, Manhattan neighborhood; the Columbia football team was sometimes recruited to move it.

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