Around 1886 Albert Einstein began his school career in Munich. As well as his violin lessons, which he had from age six to age thirteen, he also had religious education at home where he was taught Judaism. Two years later he entered the Luitpold Gymnasium and after this his religious education was given at school. He studied mathematics, in particular the calculus, beginning around 1891. [Since he was born in 1879, he must have been around 12 years old.]
In 1895 Einstein failed an examination that would have allowed him to study for a diploma as an electrical engineer at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich. Following the failing of the entrance exam to the ETH, Einstein attended secondary school at Aarau planning to use this route to enter the ETH in Zürich, and he did indeed succeed with his plan, graduating in 1900 as a teacher of mathematics and physics.
In 1901 he was still writing around to universities in the hope of obtaining a job, but without success. However, by mid 1901 he had a temporary job as a teacher, teaching mathematics at the Technical High School in Winterthur. Around this time he wrote: "I have given up the ambition to get to a university." Another temporary position teaching in a private school in Schaffhausen followed. Then a friend's father tried to help Einstein get a job by recommending him to the director of the patent office in Bern. Einstein was appointed as a technical expert third class.
By 1904 his position was made permanent and in 1906 he was promoted to technical expert second class. While in the Bern patent office he completed an astonishing range of theoretical physics publications, written in his spare time without the benefit of close contact with scientific literature or colleagues.
Einstein earned a doctorate from the University of Zürich in 1905 for a thesis On a new determination of molecular dimensions.
[From this point on, Einstein seemed to be learning from the work of other researchers...]
- In the first of three papers, all written in 1905, Einstein examined the phenomenon discovered by Maxwell Plank, according to which electromagnetic energy seemed to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities.
- Einstein's second 1905 paper proposed what is today called the special theory of relativity. He based his new theory on a reinterpretation of the classical principle of relativity, namely that the laws of physics had to have the same form in any frame of reference. As a second fundamental hypothesis, Einstein assumed that the speed of light remained constant in all frames of reference, as required by Maxwell's theory.
- Later in 1905 Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent. Einstein was not the first to propose all the components of special theory of relativity. His contribution is unifying important parts of classical mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics.
- The third of Einstein's papers of 1905 concerned statistical mechanics, a field that had been studied by Ludwig Boltzmann and Josiah Gibbs.
- About 1912, Einstein began a new phase of his gravitational research, with the help of his mathematician friend Marcel Grossman, by expressing his work in terms of the tensor calculus of Tullio Levi-Civita and Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro.
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