His books detailing the lives of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and others feel more like novels than boring lists of facts and accomplishments. The young Einstein was such a persistent classroom rebel – he despised the rote drilling and formal authority that characterized the German school system – that he got himself kicked out of school.Īlthough Einstein was a difficult and aloof companion, he was abundantly generous and loved by many.Walter Isaacson might be the best and most celebrated biographer alive today. As a result, he developed a detached aloofness, which may have contributed to his willingness later to break off from the scientific herd.Īt the time, he also developed a lasting contempt for authority.

Although his teachers were liberal, he suffered anti-Semitic attacks from other children. Later, Einstein reflected that these developmental irregularities allowed him to preserve a childlike wonder about those things that adults took for granted, things like space and time.Īdditionally, Einstein’s Jewish background made him an outsider in Germany, and this sense of otherness proved formative.

And yet, by the age of 12 he had mastered applied arithmetic. Talmud introduced the future scientist to the works of Aaron Bernstein and Kant, and to geometry.Įinstein’s unusual mental development also played a key role in shaping the man he would become: He was slow to develop linguistically and he didn’t ace his university mathematics courses. The visit of a medical student, Max Talmud, to Einstein’s childhood home was another formative experience. The instrument became a constant companion throughout Einstein’s life later, he would puzzle out complex problems while playing music. This experience instilled in him a sense of scientific wonder that would last throughout his entire life.Īround the same time, his mother arranged violin lessons, which proved pivotal. Upon examining it, the young Einstein started trembling and grew cold with excitement. His father, for instance, gave his son a compass when the boy was four-years-old and sick in bed. But how did it all begin?Įinstein was born into an independent-minded family that valued learning. We all know that Einstein achieved extraordinary things over the course of his illustrious professional life.

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