In 1905 the world of science was turned upside-down by a couple of papers written by a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office; his name was Albert Einstein. This year marks the centenary of those papers, and it is 50 years since Einstein died in 1955. There will be celebrations around the world, starting on Radio 4 this week and continuing with Horizon next week.

Einstein is often seen as a genial genius with a shock of white hair, who invented something brilliant called relativity. In fact the mad-professor image developed after he had become world famous. His early life was a mass of contradictions and incompetence.

He was born in Germany, but his parents moved to Italy when he was 15, leaving him behind so as not to disrupt his education. Thereafter he never tried very hard at his studies, and excelled only in mathematics.

His love life was chaotic. He behaved dreadfully towards his first serious girlfriend, Mileva, and did not marry her until a year after the birth of their daughter Lieserl, who then disappeared. He ruined both his marriages by womanizing.

For one of the most brilliant men of all time he had an exceptional talent for making mistakes. In June 1930 he visited Nottingham, partly in tribute to George Green, the mathematical miller, who a hundred years earlier had written an amazing mathematical essay. During the afternoon he went to pay homage to Isaac Newton and Newton’s birthplace, Woolsthorpe Manor. Unfortunately there are two Woolsthorpes, and Einstein went to the wrong one. As a result he was late for his lecture to the fair citizens of Nottingham that evening, which happened to be the hottest day of the year. He appeared in full evening dress, sweating profusely,  and talked about general relativity for two hours in German. Even the brightest of his audience might have been forgiven for coming to hate that famous equation e=mc squared.

But he was a good man; he used his world fame to become a statesman for world peace. Realizing that Germany had to be defeated in the second world war, he copied out in handwriting his first paper on relativity, which sold for $6.5 million towards the American war effort. He was appalled by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, and urged the United Nations to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons; would that he had succeeded.

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