Albert Einstein
In the single year of 1905 he published papers on special relativity, on the photoelectric effect and on Brownian motion — each of the three rewrote its own corner of physics. General relativity (1915) explained gravity as the curvature of space-time and predicted that starlight grazing the Sun would be bent; the eclipse observations of 1919 found that bending, and Einstein woke up world-famous. The Nobel Prize came for the photoelectric effect, not for relativity, which was still thought contentious. From 1933 he lived in the United States and worked at Princeton, spent his last decades looking for a unified field theory, and kept speaking out against war and racial segregation.
He was born in Ulm on 14 March 1879 at 11:30 local mean time: Germany had no single time zone yet, so the hour is reckoned by the longitude of the city itself. Date and hour come from the birth record and are quoted in astrological reference books without variance — a rare thing for a nineteenth-century chart.