In the golden year of 1905, the man who would become the most iconic scientist of his time published three papers, each of which revolutionized a separate branch of physics. He was not at that time a professional scientist. He had studied at university but had not been able to obtain a teaching position and was working as a clerical official in the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. His name, of course, was Albert Einstein. If any one person can symbolize modern physics, it is Einstein. To many, he also symbolizes mathematical genius, but in fact he was merely a competent mathematician, not a creative one on the level of Galois or Killing. Einstein’s creativity lay not in producing new mathematics but in an extraordinarily rigorous intuition about the physical world, which he was able to express through remarkable uses of existing mathematics. Einstein also had a flair for the right philosophical standpoint. He drew radical theories from the simplest of principles and was guided by a sense of elegance rather than a wide knowledge of experimental facts.
