Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity and the most famous equation in the world, E equals m c squared, and won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect. He was visiting the United States in 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany, and he never went back: he settled at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and stayed until his death in 1955.

He turns up on our Ivy League walks at one remove. At Columbia, the Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard drafted a letter to President Roosevelt in 1939 warning that Germany might build an atomic bomb, and got Einstein to sign it; the earliest work of the Manhattan Project was done in Pupin Hall. At Dartmouth, the mathematician John Kemeny, who invented the BASIC programming language there, had once been Einstein's assistant at Princeton.