FEMALE PIONEER:
MILEVA MARIC (1875 - 1948)

Mileva Maric was a Serbian mathematician, and Albert Einstein’s first wife. She was Einstein’s companion, colleague, and confidante: the degree of her participation in his discoveries is contested.

Mileva was born in Titel in Vojvodina, Serbia from a Serbian family. During her early years at university, she became an acquaintance of Nikola Tesla as a mathematics student. In the spring 1896 she started studying for a medical diploma at the University of Zurich, but after one term switched to section VIA of the Swiss Federal Polytechnic as the only female student that year, and only the fifth woman in its history. Einstein started his studies in that section the same year. Einstein and Maric met and over the next few years their friendship was to develop into love, but after one year, in 1887 October, she formally withdrew from the polytechnic to study at Heidelberg university, where women were not allowed to matriculate.

During 1897 and 1898 they corresponded, and she returned to the polytechnic in April 1898, where Einstein helped her catch up lost time. Because of the gap. at Heidelberg she had to sit the intermediate examinations in October 1899, one year after Einstein, and confessed to stress and frustration with her revision. Her marks in physics were the same as Einstein’s - 5.5 (out of 6) - but were 5 or lower in the other subjects. The same academic year she also had to sit the final examinations too, in the summer of 1900, but failed with an average mark of 4. She returned to Vojvodina intending to study and retake the examinations the next year, 1901. She became pregnant in the spring of 1901, and again failed the final examination for the teaching certificate in July. In January 1902 she gave birth to their daughter Lieserl, and married Einstein on January 6, 1903 in Berne.

After their marriage, Mileva sacrified her professional goals, helping Einstein’s career instead. Mileva entered Einstein’s life in a crucial period of his scientific achievements. Einstein and Maric had two sons and a daughter, their daughter Lieserl, born before their marriage, is variously said to have been adopted, and to have died in childhood: her actual fate is unknown. Hans Albert, their older son, became a professor in hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. The other son was psychotic, and Mileva cared for him until she died in 1948.

The winter semester of 1897 to 1898 Mileva spent in Heidelberg. She was fascinated with a lecture about the relationship between the velocity of a molecule and the distance traversed by it between collisions, and wrote about it to Einstein. This was a topic relevant in Einstein’s studies of Brownian motion, discussed in one of his famous three papers published in 1905. Einstein admired Mileva’s intellectual independence and ambitions. He once said that he was lucky to find Mileva, ‘a creature who is my equal and who is strong and independent as I am’.

The extent of Mileva’s contribution to Einstein’s work is controversial. According to Evan Harris Walker, a physicist, the basic ideas for relativity came from Mileva. Senta Troemel-Ploetz, a German linguist, says that the ideas may have been Albert’s, but Mileva did the mathematics. On the other hand, John Stachel, keeper of Albert’s letters, says that Mileva was little more than a sounding board. The case for Mileva as co-genius mostly depends on letters in which Albert referred to ‘our’ theory and ‘our’ work and on a divorce agreement in which Albert promised her his Nobel Prize money. He gave to Mileva the money from the Nobel Prize he received but he did not publicly acknowledge her scientific involvement in his work. Mileva used the award money to support her sons. Biographer Abram Joffe claims to have seen an original manuscript for the theory of relativity which was signed, ‘Einstein-Maric’. Life and love had an unequal effect in lives of Einstein and Mileva as man and woman, and as scientists. Einstein left her for another woman and Mileva spent the rest of her life struggling to support herself and her children, including a psychotic son.

http://www.setwomenresource.org.uk/en/role_models/pioneers/maric_mileva