Albert Einstein

His headmaster said he would never make a success out of anything, he was expelled from school at the age of 15, and the only way he could get a job was by a friend pulling some strings behind the scenes. Such was the inconspicuous start Albert Einstein made to a brilliant career in science. The advances he was to make over the next 60 years can be matched only by those of Newton two centuries before, and his theories of relativity shook the very foundations of 20th century science. He challenged the absoluteness of space and time in his papers of 1905 (when he was only 26), and his General Theory of 1915 still forms the basis of our current understanding of gravitation