August 2016

You may know Albert Einstein as the Nobel-winning physicist whose theories of relativity revolutionized our understanding of space and time. You may also know him as the wild-haired icon whose diffident manner and moth-eaten clothes belied his formidable intellect. He held up his baggy pants with rope, preferred undershirts to more formal attire, and seldom wore socks. “When I was young,” he explained, “I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.” Although this refugee from Nazi Germany was lionized for his pioneering theoretical work and the humanitarian causes he championed, he remained all his life a humble, unassuming figure with what one writer called “a total indifference to convention.”