Einstein & Mileva Marić

In 1896, Mileva Maric entered the physics and mathematics program at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, one of a very small number of women permitted to study in that program. Albert Einstein enrolled in the same program in the same year. They were classmates.

The academic records from that period are a small piece of evidence in a much larger question. Mileva's grades in mathematics were consistently strong, in some subjects stronger than Einstein's. She was the first woman to complete all the requirements of the physics diploma program at the institution, though she failed the final examination twice and never received the degree. Einstein passed.

They corresponded extensively from 1897 through their marriage in 1903, and the letters that survive are among the most important documents in the historiography of early twentieth-century physics, not because they resolve the questions about collaboration but because they raise them so precisely.

In those letters, Einstein consistently uses the language of shared project: "our work," "our research," "our theory." The use of the first person plural in describing scientific work is not casual. It is the language of collaboration. Whether it was the language of a man describing genuine intellectual partnership, or the language of a man affectionately including his partner in work that was primarily his, is a question the letters themselves cannot answer.

In January 1902, Mileva gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Lieserl, in Novi Sad, Serbia, where she had gone to be with her family. Einstein was not present at the birth. He was in Switzerland, working. The letters from this period show him asking about the child's health, asking whether she has certain characteristics, discussing what should be done.

Lieserl disappears from the record entirely by late 1903. She was either given up for adoption or died in a scarlet fever epidemic. No record of her fate has been found. She was not acknowledged publicly during Einstein's lifetime. Her existence was not known to the general public until 1987, when the letters were published.

Lieserl's erasure is one part of a broader erasure. Mileva Maric, who was a serious student of physics, who collaborated with Einstein during the years in which his most important early work was produced, who then bore his illegitimate child alone while he was elsewhere, who then married him and continued to support his work while managing their household and children, who then was left for another woman: she was, in the dominant historical narrative, not a physicist. She was Einstein's first wife.

The anecdote, whatever its precise accuracy, reflects a pattern of comment in the letters and in accounts from people who knew them during the Zurich period.

In 1905, Einstein published four papers that changed physics: the paper on the photoelectric effect (for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1921), the paper on Brownian motion, the paper on special relativity, and the paper deriving the mass-energy equivalence. They were published over a period of months. Einstein was working as a patent clerk in Bern at the time. He and Mileva were married with a young child.

The question of Mileva's contribution to these papers has been debated by historians for decades. The maximalist position, advanced by some researchers, holds that she was a full co-author who was systematically omitted. The minimalist position holds that she was a supportive partner who helped with calculations but did not contribute to the conceptual work. The middle positions hold that the answer is probably somewhere between and cannot be determined from the available evidence.

What is not debated: the papers were produced during a period of intense intellectual collaboration between two physicists who lived together and shared their work. The conventions of the time did not require or expect acknowledgment of a wife's contribution. The historical record was not designed to capture it.

Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for the photoelectric effect. He and Mileva had been divorced since 1919. As part of the divorce agreement, Einstein promised to give Mileva the Nobel Prize money if and when he received it. This was an unusual provision. Prize money is not a standard element of divorce settlements.

Historians have interpreted this provision in different ways. One interpretation is that it was simply a financial arrangement to support Mileva and their sons. Another interpretation is that Einstein acknowledged, in this practical and concrete way, that Mileva had contributed to the work that the prize recognized, and that the money was in some sense a settlement of that contribution rather than simply alimony.

There is no document in which Einstein explicitly credits Mileva with co-authorship of the 1905 papers. There is also no document in which he explicitly denies it. The Nobel Prize money arrangement is the closest thing to an answer that the historical record provides, and it does not close the question.

Mileva Maric's story is not unique. It is one instance of a pattern that has been documented across the history of science, literature, and intellectual life: the woman whose contribution was absorbed into her male partner's legacy, who received less credit during their active collaboration, and essentially no credit after the relationship ended.

Marie Curie is the counter-example most often cited, the woman who received the credit and the prizes. But Curie is the counter-example precisely because she is unusual. The more typical pattern is Mileva's: the woman who was present, who contributed, and who is known primarily as the wife of.

The feminist historiography of science beginning in the 1970s made the recovery of these figures one of its central projects, not because all the women contributed equally or were suppressed equally, but because the historical record was constructed in a way that systematically made their contributions invisible, and making something invisible is not the same as it not having existed.

Einstein left Mileva for his cousin Elsa Lowenthal, whom he married in 1919 and who remained his wife until her death in 1936. Elsa was not a physicist. She was a homemaker. Einstein described her function in his life explicitly as domestic and supportive, in contrast to whatever Mileva's function had been.

The contrast is revealing. With Mileva, he had a partner who was his intellectual equal in training and possibly in capability. He seems to have found this relationship eventually unbearable, though the reasons are not fully clear. With Elsa, he had what he described more conventionally: a wife who took care of the domestic arrangements so that he could work.

What this says about the earlier relationship, about what he needed from it and what it actually was, is a matter of interpretation. It does suggest that the collaborative arrangement with Mileva was not the arrangement he wanted permanently, which is itself information about how the collaboration was experienced from his side.

- Gabor, Andrea. Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women. Viking, 1995. - Highfield, Roger, and Paul Carter. The Private Lives of Albert Einstein. Faber and Faber, 1993. - Holton, Gerald, and Yehuda Elkana, eds. Albert Einstein: Historical and Cultural Perspectives. Princeton University Press, 1982. - Popovic, Milan, ed. In Albert's Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Maric, Einstein's First Wife. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. - Stachel, John. "Albert Einstein and Mileva Maric: A Collaboration That Failed to Develop." In Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am. Rutgers University Press, 1996. - Trbuhovic-Gjuric, Desanka. In the Shadow of Albert Einstein: The Tragic Life of Mileva Einstein-Maric. 1969. Translated and republished in various editions.

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Interpretive opinion based on the public record. Not a clinical assessment or diagnosis of any individual.