The Other Einstein

by Marie Benedict

a generalized theory of relativity that extended the principle of relativity to all observers, no matter how they were moving with respect to one another,

Madame Curie’s

could see the youthful Marya Sklodowska she had once been, the young Polish student eager to excel at the disciplines reserved for boys.

perfidy.

my brilliant Hans Albert, who went on to become an engineer, and my poor Tete, who succumbed to mental illness—I

The part she might have played in the formation of Albert’s groundbreaking theories in 1905 was hotly contested, particularly once a cache of letters between the couple from the years 1897 to 1903—when Mileva and Albert were university students together and first married—was discovered in the 1980s.

http://einsteinpapers.press.princeton.edu.

fiction. For example, the exact fate of Lieserl is mysterious,

Michele Zackheim wrote a wonderful book called Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl about

the precise nature of Mileva’s contribution to the 1905 theories attributed to Albert is unknown,

Albert Einstein/Mileva Marić: The Love Letters, edited by Jürgen Renn and Robert Schulmann; Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance by Dennis Overbye; In Albert’s Shadow: The Life and Letters of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife by Milan Popovic; Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson; and Einstein’s Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women by Andrea Gabor.