Albert Einstein was a German physicist born in 1879 who developed the theory of relativity and explained the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. He was born in Germany but obtained Swiss citizenship after studying at the Federal Polytechnical School of Zurich. Einstein published four groundbreaking scientific papers in 1905 that established him as one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century, including his theories of special relativity, mass-energy equivalence, and explanations of the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. He later taught at universities in Bern, Prague, and Berlin before moving to the United States in 1932 to escape the rise of Nazism, where he spent the rest of his life teaching and researching.