Hans Albert Einstein - Life and Career

Life and Career

Hans Albert Einstein was born in Bern, Switzerland, where his father worked as a clerk in the patent office. His father was of German-Jewish descent and his mother Serbian. His younger brother, Eduard Einstein, was born in 1910 and died in 1965. The fate of his older sister, Lieserl Einstein, Albert Einstein's and Mileva Marić's first child, is unknown. Their parents divorced in 1919 after living apart for five years.

In 1927 he married Frieda Knecht. Ironically, Albert Einstein disapproved of Frieda much as his parents had of Mileva. Hans Albert and Frieda had five children — Bernhard Caesar (1930–2008) was a physicist, and engineer. Klaus Martin (1932–1938) died of diphtheria. Two subsequent boys died several days after their birth. They adopted a daughter, Evelyn (1941–2011), soon after her birth. Frieda died in 1958, and Hans Albert later married Elizabeth Roboz.

Hans Albert followed his father's footsteps and studied at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of technology, in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1926 he was awarded the diploma in civil engineering. From 1926 to 1930 he worked as a steel designer on a bridge project in Dortmund. In 1936 Hans Albert obtained the doctor of technical science degree. His doctoral thesis "Bed Load Transport as a Probability Problem" is considered the definitive work on sedimentation transportation.

Hans Albert's father, Albert Einstein, left Germany in 1933 to escape the virulently antisemitic Nazi threat. Heeding his father's advice, Hans Albert emigrated from Switzerland to Greenville, South Carolina in 1938. He worked for the US Department of Agriculture, studying sedimentation transport from 1938 to 1943. He continued working for the USDA at the California Institute of Technology starting in 1943. In 1947 Hans Albert took a position as associate professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He continued his career advancing to full professor, and later professor emeritus. As an authority in his field, Hans Albert traveled the world to participate in hydraulic engineering conferences. He was at a symposium at Woods Hole in Massachusetts when he collapsed and died from a sudden cardiovascular event.

Hans Albert enjoyed life. He was an avid sailor, frequently taking colleagues and family out for excursions on the San Francisco Bay. On his many field trips and academic excursions, he took thousands of pictures, many of which he developed himself, and presented as slide shows. He also loved music, and played flute and piano.

Read more about this topic:  Hans Albert Einstein

Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or career:

    Never before since Jamestown and Plymouth Rock has our American civilization been in such danger as now.... [The Nazis] have made it clear that not only do they intend to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
    Frantz Fanon (1925–1961)

    They want to play at being mothers. So let them. Expressing tenderness in their own way will not prevent girls from enjoying a successful career in the future; indeed, the ability to nurture is as valuable a skill in the workplace as the ability to lead.
    Anne Roiphe (20th century)