After the death of Einstein in April 1955, in a public eulogy Oppenheimer wrote that "physicists lost their greatest colleague". He noted that of all the great accomplishments in Physics, the theory of general relativity is the work of one man, and it would have remained undiscovered for a long time had it not been for the work of Einstein. He ascertained that the public image of Einstein as a simple and kindhearted man “with warm humor,... wholly without pretense” was indeed right, and remembered what Einstein once said to him before his death, "You know, when it once has been given to a man to do something sensible, afterwards life is a little strange." Oppenheimer wrote that it was given to Einstein to do "something reasonable". He stated that general theory of relativity is "perhaps the single greatest theoretical synthesis in the whole of science". Oppenheimer wrote that more than anything, the one special quality, that made Einstein unique was “his faith that there exists in the natural world an order and a harmony and that this may be apprehended by the mind of man”, and that Einstein had given not just an evidence of that faith, but also its heritage.