102 Master Minds of Modern Science 



solving problems. He read book after book on mathe- 

 matics and geometry, and shot so far ahead of his school- 

 mates that when he was only fifteen his mathematical 

 master vowed that he was already fit to go to the 

 university. 



Then a great happiness came into his life, for his parents 

 moved to Italy. The boy delighted in the beauties of the 

 Apennines and walked for miles over the great and splen- 

 did hills. He loved the sun and the brightness that 

 surrounded him. At seventeen he was admitted to the 

 Technical School at Zurich, in Switzerland, where young 

 men are trained as teachers, but the fact that he was not 

 Swiss by birth prevented his gaining such a position, and 

 he became a private tutor. 



All through these years he was reading deeply in his 

 spare time and discovering things for himself. Presently 

 he obtained a position in the Swiss Patent Office as 

 technical expert. This was very helpful, and his powers 

 developed steadily, until in 1905 he began to publish 

 papers on profound scientific subjects, which at once 

 attracted the attention of thinkers and brought him a 

 professorship at Zurich. In 191 1 he was given a professor- 

 ship at Prague, but he soon came back to Switzerland, of 

 which country he has become a citizen. 



One of the greatest of French physicists, Henri 

 Poincare, spent a year in struggling with Einstein's new 

 theory of Relativity, and although he confessed that he 

 found it extremely difficult to understand, he became one 

 of the young man's warmest admirers. 



Albert Einstein reached his fiftieth year in 1929. He is 

 very happily married, and leads as quiet a life as the world 

 allows him to lead. Allowed, we say, because it is the 

 penalty of his fame that he is swamped with letters and 

 requests for interviews. He has no laboratory — just a 

 quiet upstairs room where he sits with a few books and 

 a writing-pad and develops his theories. But he is no 



