couple. The young Albert displayed an early interest in science, but he was unhappy with the principles of obedience and conformity that governed his Catholic elementary school. At the age of ten, he began attending the Luitpold Gymnasium, though most of his education consisted of the study and reading he undertook on his own under the guidance of his Uncle Jakob and the young medical student and family friend Max Talmud. Talmud recommended popular science and philosophy books that put an abrupt end to the boy's short-lived but intense religious fervor, perhaps to the relief of his nonobservant parents.
When his parents moved to Italy in 1893, Einstein dropped out of school and renounced both his German citizenship and his Jewish faith. He applied to study at the Zurich Polytechnic, an advanced Swiss technical institute. However, he failed the entrance examinations and was not accepted until spending a year of preparation at a Swiss secondary school. Between 1896 and 1900, he participated in a teachers' training program at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he met his lifelong friends Marcel Grossman and Michele Angelo Besso, as well as his first wife, Mileva Maric. Following the completion of his program in 1900, Einstein went on to work as a teacher and tutor in a series of posts in Germany and Switzerland. He finally settled in Bern, Switzerland, in 1902, where he received a job as a technical expert in a patent office. In Bern, Einstein married Mileva and the couple raised two sons together.
The year 1905 has been termed Einstein's annus mirabilis, or miracle year, because it was in this year that the scientist published three of his most important papers and completed most of the work for his doctoral degree, which he received in 1906. Einstein's papers dealt with quantum theory, Brownian motion, and special relativity. In subsequent years, he expanded his theory of special relativity to account for accelerating frames of reference, so that he could then theorize that the laws of physics (including both mechanics and electrodynamics) are the same for all observers in all frames of reference. This theory, known as general relativity, was fully formulated by 1915. In 1919, scientists verified general relativity through measurements taken during a solar eclipse, and Einstein was catapulted into a position of international prominence. However, while his relativity theory won him popular fame, it was his contributions to quantum theory that won Einstein a Nobel Prize in 1922.
For most of Einstein's life, he worked as a university professor. He began at the University of Bern in 1909, but also taught at Prague and Zurich before ultimately settling at the University of Berlin and the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1915. Although Mileva and their sons initially lived in Berlin with Albert, the couple separated shortly thereafter and in 1919 obtained an official divorce. Einstein remarried that same year, to his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, and lived with her until her death in 1936.