Friendships of a Genius

Did you know that today is Einstein's birthday? If he lived he would be 128 years old. He was a genius. Period – there's nothing else that is needed to be said about him. He contributed a lot of stuff to theoretical physics and helped the field grow and today because of him we understand our universe better than we did before. But that is all beside the point.
Take a moment and think about it. If you look at Einstein's life, it's filled with catalyst friends that move him forward to the next level. When Albert Einstein was about ten a family friend, Max Talmud introduced him to key science and philosophy texts from authors like Kant and Euclid. Soon Einstein was doing calculus! Einstein's biggest support was a friend Mileva Marić (the only woman studying mathematics at the institute Einstein was in – ETH) and later they became romantic partners.

It was also another friend Michele Besso introduced him to the works of Ernst Mach – which allowed him to publish a paper in Annalen der Physik entitled "Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen" ("Consequences of the observations of capillarity phenomena"), on the capillary forces of a straw. In this paper his quest for a unified physical law becomes apparent, which he followed throughout his life. As a cause of this slowly the academic community considered him as "the best sounding board in Europe" for physical ideas.
The bottom line is, he wouldn't have made it without his friends. He wouldn't be known as Einstein the genius today. What about you? Your friends? Who pushes you the most? Who's there for you? Why don't you take a pause and appreciate those friendships? Here's a couple of ecards to help you along --