Albert Einstein was born in Ulm (Germany) on March 14, 1879. In 1894 he left his homeland and joined his family, who had moved to Italy for business reasons. In 1896 he renounced to his German citizenship and remained stateless until 1901, when he became a citizen of Switzerland. He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédéral in Zurich between 1896 and 1900. Unable to obtain an academic job, he worked as a clerk in the Patent Office in Berne, from 1902 to 1909, the year he obtained his first job as associate professor of theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. In 1903, he married his fellow student Mileva Maric. They had three children (they also had a girl born before they married, whose fate is unknown), separated in 1914 and divorced in 1919. That same year he married his cousin, Elsa. He obtained his first professorship at the German Karl-Ferdinands-Universität, Prague in 1911, but the following year he moved to another chair at his alma mater, the Polytechnic of Zurich. He left this position in 1914 to accept a triple offer: a chair without teaching duties at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and the membership of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. In 1921, already world famous, he made his first major contribution to the Jewish cause: he traveled to United States to raise funds for the creation of a Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In 1922, Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. In 1933, Hitler came to power and Einstein, who at that time was in United States, resigned all his posts in Berlin and settled finally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1940 he acquired U.S. citizenship, although he retained his Swiss citizenship. He died in Princeton in 1955.