40 Interesting Albert Einstein Facts for Kids 2023 [Must Read]
Read our cool facts about Albert Einstein and go to our Activity section at the end to test your knowledge using our question sheets!
This was one super-smart man who is one of the most famous scientists and inventors the world has ever seen and quite possibly will ever see!
Albert Einstein Timeline Infographic:
Check out this cool interactive infographic from Savvy Leo, showing the timeline of Albert Einstein’s life! (Desktop only).
Quick Albert Einstein Facts for Kids
- Einstein was a proficient musician who loved to play the violin.
- The idea that Albert Einstein was a poor school student is untrue; Einstein was a brilliant student from a young age and taught himself algebra and geometry.
- Albert Einstein proved himself in the world of academia at age 26, publishing 4 papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy.
- Even though he was a brilliant man, Einstein’s actual IQ remains unknown to this day.
- He created the world’s most famous equation: E = mc2.
- Einstein was a campaigner for the civil rights of African Americans and went so far as to pay the tuition fees of a black student.
- While he loved sailing, Einstein was famous for being a terrible sailor who often flipped his boat and needed rescuing.
- Einstein was asked to be the President of Israel, but he turned down the offer.
- The special effects team behind Star Wars modeled Yoda’s face after Einstein’s.
Albert Einstein Biography
Young Einstein
Albert Einstein was born on the 14th of March 1879 in Ulm, Germany. As he was Jewish, he moved to the US to escape Hitler and the Second World War.
Unbelievably when his grandmother first saw him, she said he was stupid…little did she know!
Apparently he didn’t talk until he was four years old, and even then he would repeat words and sentences over and over again until he was seven.
When he was about five years old his Dad gave him a simple pocket compass, which became his favorite toy!
From that day on he became obsessed with magnetism, which is pretty much all about magnets and how they work.
Apparently young Einstein didn’t like the way his grammar school taught him, with all that discipline. He also didn’t really care all that much for authority…so he got expelled from school.
Another headmaster also told him that nothing would ever come of him!
Well, wasn’t that was another one who completely didn’t know what this genius would get up to in later life?
Einstein’s Childhood
From the age of seven he started loving mathematics and science. Do you love these subjects? If you do, maybe you’ll be the next Einstein!
When Albert Einstein was about ten years old, a friend of his who was much older than him, gave him a whole heap of books on science, mathematics and philosophy. Philosophy is all about how we think about life.
By sixteen years old he’d published his first scientific paper. That is completely unbelievable!
There have been loads of stories which said that Albert Einstein failed math at school, but his family said it was absolutely not true.
They said he was always top of his class at math and could solve some really complicated problems.
He loved geometry and algebra, and nobody taught him these subjects – he did it all by himself! He also always tried to prove different math theories on his own.
Yep, he was a very smart person.
What was his life like after school?
Although he wasn’t a top student at school at everything, when he got a bit older he certainly made up for it, when he and his family moved to Switzerland.
In 1900, he started teaching maths and physics.
Einstein was just a touch disorganized. So if you are too, don’t worry, there’s hope!
As an adult he often forgot appointments and as his amazing brain was all over the place his lectures were a bit difficult to understand.
He had uncombed hair and never wore socks! Even at posh dinners he would arrive all untidy with crumpled clothes, and of course no socks!
What made him famous?
Even though he was all over the place, a bit shabby and a bit difficult to understand, in 1915 he rocked the world with his Theory of Relativity.
In 1919 Einstein’s theory was proven right by an experiment. He became famous literally overnight and all of a sudden he got invitations to go all over the place, as well as getting honors from all over the world!
He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He certainly did come a long way from that boy who was told he would amount to nothing!
That headmaster was probably eating his words.
His own discoveries led us to have all sorts of things today like garage door openers, television, and DVD players. He was named ‘Person of the Century’ in 1999 by Time magazine.
One of his favorite things to do was to head out onto a lake in a boat and take his notebook with him, to think and write everything down. Maybe this is what inspired him to come up with his inventions!
Interesting Einstein Facts
He couldn’t swim at all, but he carried on sailing right throughout his life.
When he was young he didn’t like the violin at all. But then he heard Mozart’s music when he was thirteen, and that completely changed his mind.
From that day on, he loved playing the violin and the piano.
He said, “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music…I do know that I get most joy in life out of my violin.”
Einstein loved to use his imagination. He said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Albert Einstein had two sons from his first marriage. It is thought his daughter, Lierserl, died young. Einstein married twice and his second wife was his cousin, but she died before him.
The Einstein died in America on 18th April 1955. He was 76 years old when he died.
This was one very interesting man indeed!
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