Leon battista alberti biography of albert einstein

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian Renaissance humanist author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher and cryptographer; he epitomised the Renaissance Man.

Although he is often characterized exclusively as an architect, as James Beck has observed, "to single out one of Leon Battista's 'fields' over others as somehow functionally independent and self-sufficient is of no help at all to any effort to characterize Alberti's extensive explorations in the fine arts." Although Alberti is known mostly for being an artist, he was also a mathematician of many sorts and made great advances to this field during the 15th century. His two most important buildings are the churches of S. Sebastiano and S. Andrea, both in Mantua.

Alberti's life was described in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Biography

Early life

Leon Battista Alberti was born in in Genoa. His mother is not known, and his father was a wealthy Florentine who had been exiled from his own city, allowed to return in Alberti was sent to boarding school in Padua, then studied Law at Bologna. He lived for a time in Florence, then travelled to Rome in where he took holy orders and entered the service of the papal court. During this time he studied the ancient ruins, which excited his interest in architecture and strongly influenced the form of the buildings that he designed.

Alberti was gifted in many ways. He was tall, strong and a fine athlete who could ride the wildest horse and jump over a man's head. He distinguished himself as a writer while he was still a child at school, and by the age of twenty had written a play which was successfully passed off as a genuine piece of Classical literature. In , he began his first major written work, Della pittura, which was inspired by the burgeoning pictorial art in Florence in the early 15th century. In this work

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Albert Einstein, a synonym for genius, was a theoretical physicist of German birth who developed the theory of relativity, a cornerstone of modern physics. 

Einstein is also known for his contributions to the philosophy of science. Einstein is most well-known to the general public for his formula E=mc^2, which has been referred to as "the world's most famous equation." 

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect," which was a crucial step in the development of quantum theory. 

Einstein's father was a salesman who later owned an electrochemical factory. Born in the German Empire, Einstein moved to Switzerland in and renounced his German citizenship in He received his teaching diploma in physics and mathematics from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich in , and became a Swiss citizen the following year. After initially having difficulty finding work, Einstein was employed as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern from to

Early in his career, Einstein believed that the principles of classical mechanics, as described by Newton, were insufficient to reconcile with the laws governing electromagnetism. This led him to work on his special theory of relativity while he was employed at the Swiss Patent Office. Evidence suggests that Einstein collaborated with his wife, Mileva Marić, on this theory, although it was published under only his name. The reason for this decision is not known. In , known as his "miracle year," Einstein published four groundbreaking papers that garnered significant attention in the academic community. The first paper discussed the photoelectric effect, the second paper addressed Brownian motion, the third introduced special relativity, and the fourth paper proposed the concept of mass-energy equivalence. That same year, at the age of 26, Einstein received his PhD

Leon Battista Alberti (–72) was an archetypical Renaissance figure whose interests and works ranged over the cultural and technical landscape of his day. An early fascination with human nature produced a comedy in the antique style, a light-hearted collection of dinner pieces, a dissertation on the life of the intellectual, a discourse on the character of love and another on virtue and family relations. After these, came a careful study of the law as well as a proposal to reform the Tuscan language through the introduction of Latin words and phrases. Alberti’s fame, however, rests not on these achievements but on the results of his mathematical intelligence, technical curiosity and inventor’s skill applied to the nature of art – to painting, sculpture and architecture – as well as the art of writing in code. Alberti’s most well-known works are De re Aedificatoria (“On Architecture”), the first comprehensive treatment of the subject since Vitruvius, and De Pictoria (“Of Painting”), his systematic exposition of the method and practice of vanishing-point perspective that allowed a three-dimensional space to be rendered in a two-dimensional painting. Though both these treatises rely on the arithmetical and geometrical properties of angles, lines, and measured proportions they are less mathematically framed than the works offered in the book under review. “The Mathematical Works of Leon Battista Alberti” contains English translations and extensive scholarly commentary on three major contributions: Ex ludis rerum mathematicarum (title left untranslated from the Latin), Elementi di pittura (“Elements of Painting”) and De Componendis cifris (“On Writing in Cyphers”). In addition the editors include a very short work, De lunularam quadrature (“On Squaring the Lune”), of uncertain origin that has long been attributed to Alberti.

In spite of its Latin title, Ex ludis rerum mathematicarum was written in Italian and known