Mileva Marić Mileva Marić: The (Almost) Forgotten Einstein
Albert Einstein’s first wife was an auditor at Heidelberg University
Mileva Marić was one of the first women to take a mathematics and physics course at a German-speaking university – and she was the first wife of Albert Einstein. A multitude of myths have grown up around her as a person and her contribution to her husband’s early writings. What share did she have, for example, in developing the theory of relativity? This question has been the subject of heated debate among scientists and scholars from the most varied disciplines since the beginning of the 1990s and offers a new perspective on the scientific work and eventful life of Mileva Marić, who as a student also attended lectures in Heidelberg.
Born in 1875 in Titel, a town in what was then Austria-Hungary, Marić soon proved to be a keen student, showing a particular talent for scientific subjects. Her father, a former military officer and land-owner, fostered his daughter’s talent and ensured that she enjoyed excellent schooling. Accordingly, Mileva Marić attended, among others, the Royal High School for Boys in Zagreb, where she received special permission to take part in physics classes as the only girl. After graduating from high school she went to Switzerland at the age of 21 to go to university, as women were not admitted to higher education in her home country. In Zurich she first studied medicine for a semester and then changed to the Confederal Polytechnic, today’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. There she enrolled in physics and mathematics with a view to training as a secondary school teacher. Marić was the only woman in her year and only the fifth one to have ever succeeded in gaining admission to the Polytechnic.
Albert Einstein was likewise enrolled at the Polytechnic from the 1896 winter semester. He and Marić probably met in class, exchanged ideas about content, studied together and finally fell in love. Witness to that are the many still extant love letters that they wrote to each other between 1897 and 1903. Scholars assume that Einstein was attracted not only to Marić’s understanding of her subjects but also to her ambition and autonomy. In 1900 he wrote in one of his letters: “How happy I am to have met my match in you, someone who is as strong and independent as I am.”
In 1897 Mileva Marić’s independence led her to Heidelberg University, where she enrolled for a semester as an auditor. At the time, women were not admitted to university courses in Germany either, so Marić – before coming to Heidelberg − had to obtain personal permission from every professor whose class she wanted to attend. The inquiring student overcame this hurdle as well and, among other classes, attended lectures by the physics and mathematics professors Carl Köhler, Leo Königsberger and Philipp Lenard. In enthusiastic letters she reported on the content of seminars to Einstein, who had stayed in Zurich. Yet in spite of her potential and her prerequisites, Marić − whose accommodation during her time in Heidelberg is likely to have been in the Haus zum Ritter on Market Square − never achieved the same fame as Albert Einstein.
How happy and proud I will be when we have both victoriously completed our study of relative motion.
Albert Einstein
Four years after her return from Heidelberg her scientific career came to an abrupt end when she did not pass her final examinations at the Polytechnic, even after a second attempt. At the time, Marić was expecting the first of three children she would have with Albert Einstein – an illegitimate daughter whom she bore in her home town, far from the Swiss city. No definite information is available about what happened to the child, whom Albert Einstein probably never met.
Despite the stigma of a child born out of wedlock and against the will of Albert Einstein’s family, the couple wedded in Bern in 1903. The marriage of the scientists took place in what was likely Albert Einstein’s most productive creative phase and raises the question of Marić’s share in her husband’s publications, who in 1901 had written in one of his love letters: “How happy and proud I will be when we have both victoriously completed our study of relative motion.” Whether statements like these are proof that Marić co-authored the theory of relativity or are merely a compliment from her husband remains unclear to this day. It seems beyond dispute, however, that – particularly in the early years of their love and marriage − Mileva Marić was both a support and a scientific discussion partner for Albert Einstein. She again showed her own technical competence in 1903 when, with Paul Habicht, she developed a device to measure very low electrical voltages, then called the influence machine.
Many questions around her life’s work and the background of her creative process will likely remain forever unanswered. Mileva Marić died in Zurich in 1948. After her marriage to Einstein was dissolved in 1919 following a long-drawn-out crisis, she devoted herself to raising the two children and giving piano and maths lessons to support the family. She used the money from Albert Einstein’s Nobel Prize, which she received in 1922 under the divorce agreement, to care for her second son Eduard, who was mentally ill and dependent on medical support. In Zurich, plaques at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule and different places in the city recall Mileva Marić, the (almost) forgotten Einstein – one of the first women of our time to take a university course in mathematics and physics.
(published in 2016)
