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Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held as one of the most influential scientists. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula, which arises from relativity theory, has been called "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", a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius. Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in 1895, forsaking his German citizenship (as a subject of the Kingdom of Württemberg) the following year. In 1897, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Swiss federal polytechnic school in Zürich, graduating in 1900. In 1901, he acquired Swiss citizenship, which he kept for the rest of his life. In 1903, he secured a permanent position at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. In 1905, he submitted a successful PhD dissertation to the University of Zurich. In 1914, he moved to Berlin in order to join the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1917, he became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics; he also became a German citizen again, this time as a subject of the Kingdom of Prussia. In 1933, while he was visiting the United States, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Horrified by the Nazi war of extermination against his fellow Jews, Einstein decided to remain in the US, and was granted American citizenship in 1940. On the eve of World War II, he endorsed a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt alerting him to the potential German nuclear weapons program and recommended that the US begin similar research. Einstein supported the Allies but generally viewed the idea of nuclear weapons with great dismay. Einstein's work is also known for its influence on the philosophy of science. In 1905, he published four groundbreaking papers, sometimes described as his annus mirabilis (miracle year). These papers outlined a theory of the photoelectric effect, explained Brownian motion, introduced his special theory of relativity—a theory which addressed the inability of classical mechanics to account satisfactorily for the behavior of the electromagnetic field—and demonstrated that if the special theory is correct, mass and energy are equivalent to each other. In 1915, he proposed a general theory of relativity that extended his system of mechanics to incorporate gravitation. A cosmological paper that he published the following year laid out the implications of general relativity for the modeling of the structure and evolution of the universe as a whole. In the middle part of his career, Einstein made important contributions to statistical mechanics and quantum theory. Especially notable was his work on the quantum physics of radiation, in which light consists of particles, subsequently called photons. With the Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose, he laid the groundwork for Bose-Einstein statistics. For much of the last phase of his academic life, Einstein worked on two endeavors that proved ultimately unsuccessful. First, he advocated against quantum theory's introduction of fundamental randomness into science's picture of the world, objecting that "God does not play dice". Second, he attempted to devise a unified field theory by generalizing his geometric theory of gravitation to include electromagnetism too. As a result, he became increasingly isolated from the mainstream modern physics. In a 1999 poll of 130 leading physicists worldwide by the British journal Physics World, Einstein was ranked the greatest physicist of all time.

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Euclidean space

Euclidean space is the fundamental space of geometry, intended to represent physical space.

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Four-vector

In special relativity, a four-vector (or 4-vector, sometimes Lorentz vector) is an object with four components, which transform in a specific way under Lorentz transformations.

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Hendrik Lorentz

Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (18 July 1853 – 4 February 1928) was a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and theoretical explanation of the Zeeman effect.

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Hermann Minkowski

Hermann Minkowski (22 June 1864 – 12 January 1909) was a mathematician and professor at the University of Königsberg, the University of Zürich, and the University of Göttingen, described variously as German, Polish, or Lithuanian-German, or Russian.

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Hyperbolic geometry

In mathematics, hyperbolic geometry (also called Lobachevskian geometry or Bolyai–Lobachevskian geometry) is a non-Euclidean geometry.

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Hyperboloid model

In geometry, the hyperboloid model, also known as the Minkowski model after Hermann Minkowski, is a model of n-dimensional hyperbolic geometry in which points are represented by points on the forward sheet S+ of a two-sheeted hyperboloid in (n+1)-dimensional Minkowski space or by the displacement vectors from the origin to those points, and m-planes are represented by the intersections of (m+1)-planes passing through the origin in Minkowski space with S+ or by wedge products of m vectors.

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Length contraction

Length contraction is the phenomenon that a moving object's length is measured to be shorter than its proper length, which is the length as measured in the object's own rest frame.

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Lorentz transformation

In physics, the Lorentz transformations are a six-parameter family of linear transformations from a coordinate frame in spacetime to another frame that moves at a constant velocity relative to the former.

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Maxwell's equations

Maxwell's equations, or Maxwell–Heaviside equations, are a set of coupled partial differential equations that, together with the Lorentz force law, form the foundation of classical electromagnetism, classical optics, electric and magnetic circuits.

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Non-Euclidean geometry

In mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry consists of two geometries based on axioms closely related to those that specify Euclidean geometry.

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Physics

Physics is the natural science of matter, involving the study of matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force.

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Poincaré disk model

In geometry, the Poincaré disk model, also called the conformal disk model, is a model of 2-dimensional hyperbolic geometry in which all points are inside the unit disk, and straight lines are either circular arcs contained within the disk that are orthogonal to the unit circle or diameters of the unit circle.

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Poincaré group

The Poincaré group, named after Henri Poincaré (1906), was first defined by Hermann Minkowski (1908) as the isometry group of Minkowski spacetime.

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Poincaré half-plane model

In non-Euclidean geometry, the Poincaré half-plane model is the upper half-plane, denoted below as H.

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Space

Space is a three-dimensional continuum containing positions and directions.

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Spacetime

In physics, spacetime, also called the space-time continuum, is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum.

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Special relativity

In physics, the special theory of relativity, or special relativity for short, is a scientific theory of the relationship between space and time.

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