Albert Einstein and Mileva Einstein-Maric

As promised in my welcome note I post a summary of some email correspondence I received before I set up this blog.

One correspondence concerned the description of Mileva Einstein-Maric's role in the development of Einstein's ideas about relativity. The correspondent said that I gave Mileva Einstein-Maric too much credit and painted her academic achievements in a glowing light.

I only became aware of the issue of Mileva Einstein-Maric's assumed contributions to Albert Einstein's work through articles in New Scientist and a television program. When I followed the stories up it became soon clear that the issue has a strong polarizing effect and that some people think that she is a forgotten genius, while others insist that this is all rumour and has no base in fact.

I am not in a position to follow this up with research of my own. I intend to go through my text again during the next few weeks and check my statements carefully. But I can says this: In the context of Science, Civilization and Society it is of no consequence whether Mileva had comparable or even better marks than Albert at university or whether her marks were rather average. The important point of her life is that she was a woman who was denied her chance to an academic career, which she could have had, had she been born a man. Her life is thus an illuminating example for the situation of women in science at the beginning of the 20th century.

How much Einstein himself contributed to the suppression of Mileva Maric's career I am in no position to judge, and I do not want to dwell on that aspect very long. His donation of his Nobel prize money to his divorced wife could have been motivated by a bad conscience, it could also have been motivated by generosity. What makes one uneasy about young Einstein's attitude to other people's work is the total lack of references in his seminal paper, which was after all not created out of thin air but was the culmination of developments to which a few others had made major contributions - maybe Milena Maric was one of them, maybe not.

Matthias Tomczak