Pre-reading Task: NOTE MAKING: Albert Einstein at School

Albert Einstein born 14 March 1879 was a German-born theoretical physicist who developed the General Theory of Relativity, affecting a revolution in Physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of Modern Physics and the most influential physicist of the 20th century. 

Best known for his mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc² (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect", which was pivotal in establishing the Quantum Theory.

His father was Hermann Einstein, a salesman and engineer. His mother was Pauline Einstein (née Koch). In 1880, the family moved to Munich, where his father and his uncle founded a company that manufactured electrical equipment based on direct current. The Einsteins were non-observant Jews. Albert attended a Catholic elementary school from the age of five for three years.

Later, at the age of eight, Einstein was transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium where he received advanced primary and secondary school education. As he grew up, Einstein built models and mechanical devices for fun and began to show a talent for mathematics. In 1894, his father's company failed. In search of business, the Einstein family moved to Italy, first to Milan and then, a few months later, to Pavia. When the family moved to Pavia, Einstein stayed in Munich to finish his studies at the Luitpold Gymnasium. His father intended for him to pursue electrical engineering, but Einstein clashed with authorities and resented the school's regimen and teaching method. He later wrote that the spirit of learning and creative thought were lost in strict rote learning. At the end of December 1894, he travelled to Italy to join his family in Pavia, convincing the school to let him go by using a doctor's note. He had spent seven years at this school by then.

In late summer 1895, at the age of sixteen, Einstein sat the entrance examinations for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich and failed to reach the required standard in several subjects. However, he obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics. He then attended the Aargau Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1895-96 to complete his secondary schooling. In January 1896, with his father's approval, he renounced his citizenship in the German Kingdom to avoid military service. At the age of only seventeen, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the ETH Zurich.

Einstein's future wife, Mileva Marić, also enrolled at the Polytechnic that same year, the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section of the teaching diploma course. Over the next few years, Einstein and Marić's friendship developed into romance, and they read books together on extra-curricular physics in which Einstein was taking an increasing interest. In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma, but Marić failed the examination with a poor grade in the mathematics component, theory of functions. There have been claims that Marić collaborated with Einstein on his celebrated 1905 papers, but historians of physics who have studied the issue find no evidence that she made any substantial contributions.

He was visiting the United States when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, and did not go back to Germany, where he had been a professor at the Berlin Academy of Sciences. He settled in the U.S., becoming a citizen in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he helped alert President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Germany might be developing an atomic weapon, and recommended that the U.S. begin similar research; this eventually led to what would become the Manhattan Project. Einstein was affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, until his death on April 18, 1955.

Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers along with over 150 non-scientific works. His great intelligence and originality have made the word "Einstein" synonymous with genius.

In your language notebooks, make notes on the above passage using a suitable heading, sub topics with significant details and recognizable abbreviations. Then summarise the notes into a paragraph of about 80 words.