famous smokers

Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder (born 7 April 1944), smoker, German politician, was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), he led a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens. Before becoming a full-time politician, he was a successful lawyer, and before becoming Chancellor he was Minister-president of the German state of Lower Saxony. Following the 2005 federal election, which his party lost after three weeks of negotiations he stood down as Chancellor in favour of Angela Merkel of the rival Christian Democratic Union.

Schröder was born in Mossenberg, in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. His father Fritz Schröder, a lance corporal in the Wehrmacht was killed during World War II in action in Romania on 4 October 1944, a few months after Gerhard's birth. Friz Schröder's grave is in Ceanu Mare, Cluj, Romania.

Schröder completed an apprenticeship in retail sales in a Lemgo hardware shop from 1958 to 1961, then worked in a retail shop in Lage and after that as an unskilled construction worker and a sales clerk in Göttingen while studying at night school to gain a high school diploma. Still trying to a place at a university, in 1966 Schröder passed the Abitur test at Westfalen-Kolleg, Bielefeld. From 1966 to 1971 he studied law at the University of Göttingen. From 1972 onwards Schröder served as an assistant at Göttingen University. In 1976, he passed his second law examination and worked as a lawyer until 1990.

"If at first an idea isn't absurd, there's no hope for it" - A. Einstein

Albert Einstein (14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955), pipe smoker, was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is best known for his theory of relativity and specifically mass–energy equivalence, E = mc². Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.

Einstein's many contributions to physics include his special theory of relativity, which reconciled mechanics with electromagnetism, and his general theory of relativity, which was intended to extend the principle of relativity to non-uniform motion and to provide a new theory of gravitation. His other contributions include relativistic cosmology, capillary action, critical opalescence, classical problems of statistical mechanics and their application to quantum theory, an explanation of the Brownian movement of molecules, atomic transition probabilities, the quantum theory of a monoatomic gas, thermal properties of light with low radiation density (which laid the foundation for the photon theory), a theory of radiation including stimulated emission, the conception of a unified field theory, and the geometrization of physics.

Einstein published over 300 scientific works and over 150 non-scientific works. Einstein is revered by the physics community, and in 1999 Time magazine named him the "Person of the Century". In wider culture the name "Einstein" has become synonymous with genius.