Albert Einstein was born in 1879 in Germany to a middle-class Jewish family. As a child, he was fascinated by invisible forces after encountering a compass at age 5. He mastered higher mathematics by age 16. He studied at the Higher Technical School in Zurich, graduating in 1900. After graduation, Einstein worked in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. In 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers, one establishing the photoelectric effect and the famous equation E=mc2. Einstein is renowned for his theories of special and general relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his services to theoretical physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.