On March 14, 1879, in the German town of Ulm, a baby with a strangely large head was born to a feather-bed-selling family. His worried parents thought something might be wrong with him because he didn't start talking until he was around three. The doctors said he'd be fine. The baby's name was Albert Einstein, and the date of his birth - 3/14 - would later be celebrated worldwide as Pi Day, since pi starts with 3.14.
Young Albert was a daydreamer who loved his pocket compass and wondered what made the needle always point north. He didn't do great in school, which was full of strict teachers and memorization. But in 1905, when he was 26 and working as a patent clerk in Switzerland, he published four scientific papers that completely rewrote physics. One paper led to the most famous equation in the world, E=mc², which showed that even a tiny bit of matter contains enormous amounts of energy. He won the Nobel Prize in 1921 and became so famous his wild white hair turned into the symbol for "genius."
Einstein later moved to America, helped warn the U.S. government about the possibility of atomic weapons, and spent his last years working on a unified theory of the universe. He died in 1955, but his ideas still power GPS satellites, predict black holes (which we've now photographed), and shape how we understand time, space, and gravity. Every March 14, schools eat pie, recite digits of pi, and celebrate the slow-talking, daydreaming kid from Ulm who proved curiosity might be the greatest superpower of all.
