Albert Einstein

Born in 1879, he was a Bern patent clerk — not a professor — when he published the four papers of his 1905 “miracle year,” any one of which would have made a career. General relativity followed in 1915, and in 1919 astronomers watched starlight bend around the sun exactly as he'd predicted, turning a physicist into a global headline overnight. The 1921 Nobel went, oddly, to the photoelectric effect rather than relativity. He left Germany for good when the Nazis took power in 1933, settled at Princeton, and spent his final decades chasing a unified theory he never caught — and warning the world…