Mileva Marić

• 1. Introduction

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  Mileva Marić was born on the 19th of December 1875 in Titel, a small town in what was then Austria-Hungary, and she would go on to become the only woman among six students enrolled in the same physics and mathematics diploma course at Zurich Polytechnic as Albert Einstein. She was the woman he married, the woman who bore his children, and the woman whose name may or may not have appeared on the papers that changed how humanity understands the universe. That last question has never been settled. Historians, physicists, and biographers have argued for decades about what Marić actually contributed to Einstein's early work, particularly to the celebrated annus mirabilis papers of 1905. What is certain is that she was a mathematician of serious ability who gave up her academic career when her life with Einstein began to unravel, and who ended her days in Zürich, quietly selling off the apartment buildings she had bought with his Nobel Prize money to pay for the care of their son Eduard. This is the story of Mileva Marić: a singular intellect navigating an era that had little room for women in science, and a life entangled so completely with a famous man's that separating her story from his remains, even now, an act of historical recovery.

• 2. An Unusual Education

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  Mileva Marić's father, Miloš Marić, was the kind of parent who bent the rules to give his daughter what she needed. In 1891, he obtained special permission to enroll her as a private student at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb. She was a girl in a school built for boys, studying mathematics under a teacher named Vladimir Varićak. She passed the entrance exam, entered the tenth grade in 1892, and two years later won separate permission to attend physics lectures. She passed her final exams in September 1894 with her highest marks in mathematics and physics, both graded "very good" on a scale that placed "excellent" one step above.

  Before that, her secondary schooling had moved through several institutions. She began in 1886 at a high school for girls in Novi Sad, transferred to the Mitrovica Gymnasium in Sremska Mitrovica the following year, and then from 1890 attended the Royal Serbian Grammar School in Šabac. The path through Zagreb came after that, and it required her father's direct intervention to make it possible.

  Then she fell seriously ill. The illness prompted a move to Switzerland, and on the 14th of November 1894 she enrolled at the Girls High School in Zürich. By 1896 she had passed her Matura exam and spent one semester studying medicine at the University of Zürich. In the fall of that same year, she switched again, this time to the Zurich Polytechnic, where she sat the mathematics entrance examination and passed with a grade average of 4.25 on a scale of one to six. She enrolled in the diploma course for teaching physics and mathematics in secondary schools, section VIA. She was the fifth woman ever to enter that section, and the only woman in her group of six students that year.

• 3. The Polytechnic Years

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  Albert Einstein enrolled in the same section VIA course at the same time as Marić, and the two became close friends quickly. In October 1897 she left Zürich for Heidelberg University, attending physics and mathematics lectures there as an auditor for the winter semester. She returned to the Polytechnic in April 1898 and threw herself into a dense curriculum: differential and integral calculus, descriptive and projective geometry, mechanics, theoretical physics, applied and experimental physics, and astronomy.

  She sat the intermediate diploma examinations in 1899, a year later than her fellow students. Her grade average of 5.05 placed her fifth out of six; her physics grade was 5.5, which matched Einstein's score exactly. When it came time for the final teaching diploma examinations in 1900, she failed, with a grade average of 4.00. Her weakest result was a 2.5 in the theory of functions component of the mathematics exam.

  She attempted the diploma examination again while three months pregnant in 1901, and failed a second time without improving her grade. The pregnancy had begun during a short holiday she and Einstein took in Italy in May 1901. She had hoped to develop her diploma dissertation into a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Heinrich Weber, the physics professor at the Polytechnic, but that plan collapsed. She returned to Serbia to give birth.

• 4. A Daughter and a Debate

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  The daughter, named Lieserl after her birth in late January 1902 near Novi Sad, was never publicly acknowledged. Before she was born, Marić and Einstein referred to the expected child in their letters as Hanserl, a male name. Lieserl contracted scarlet fever at around age one and sustained permanent damage from the illness. Some sources say she died in 1903; others suggest she was placed for adoption in Serbia. Einstein never met her.

  That same year, 1903, Marić and Einstein married in Bern, where he had found work at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property. Two years later, in 1905, Einstein published three papers in the Annalen der Physik that became foundational to twentieth-century physics: the theory of Brownian motion, the photon theory of light, and the theory of relativity. The question of Marić's involvement in those papers has generated a sustained scholarly argument.

  The debate pivots on a passage from the personal memoirs of the Russian physicist Abram Joffe, who referred to the author of the 1905 papers as "Einstein-Marity," the name Marity being his rendering of Marić's official name. Proponents of Marić's co-authorship have argued that Joffe was describing a joint byline. Critics have countered that Joffe likely never saw the papers before publication, and that even if he had, he probably would not have recalled the exact name on them. Around the same time, Marić told a Serbian friend that "we finished some important work that will make my husband world famous." Historians Roger Highfield and Paul Woodson have characterized that statement as "hometown folklore."

• 5. Letters and Silence

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  John Stachel, one of the most prominent scholars to examine the collaboration question, has argued that the letters in which Einstein used the words "our" theory and "our" work were written during their student years, at least four years before the 1905 papers appeared. Stachel also points out that in some instances Einstein's use of "our" referred to the diploma dissertations both he and Marić chose to write on the same topic: experimental studies of heat conduction.

  The pattern Stachel identifies is specific. When Einstein described particular scientific ideas he was working on, he used "I" and "my." Stachel counted more than a dozen references to Einstein's own studies and his own work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, against a single reference to "our" work on the problem of relative motion. In two cases where letters from Marić survive that respond directly to Einstein's descriptions of his latest ideas, she made no scientific reply at all. Stachel wrote that her letters contained only personal matters or comments related to her coursework, and that "we have no published papers, no letters with a serious scientific content, either to Einstein nor to anyone else; nor any objective evidence of her supposed creative talents."

  On the other side of the argument sit the recollections of people who knew the couple. Marić's brother and other relatives described seeing the two of them discussing physics together during their marriage. Their son Hans Albert, born in 1904, said that when his mother married Einstein she gave up her scientific ambitions, but he also recalled that their "scientific collaboration continued into their marriage" and that he had seen his parents "work together in the evenings at the same table." The evidence neither resolves the question nor dissolves it.

• 6. Marriage, Separation, Nobel Prize

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  By 1912 the marriage had grown strained. Einstein was conducting an affair with his cousin Elsa Einstein, and in July 1913 Marić was distressed by his plans to relocate to Berlin. That August, the family arranged a walking holiday with Marie Curie and her two daughters; Eduard's illness delayed Marić's arrival but she joined the group. In September 1913, on the day they were to leave Novi Sad for Vienna, Marić had their sons baptised as Orthodox Christians.

  The couple moved to Berlin together in late March 1914, but Marić took a swimming holiday with the boys in Locarno on the way and arrived in mid-April. The city never suited her. In mid-July 1914, Einstein presented her with terms for continuing the marriage that she initially accepted and then rejected. On the 29th of July 1914, the day after World War I began, she took the boys back to Zürich. The separation became permanent. Einstein committed to an annual maintenance payment of 5600 Reichsmark in quarterly installments, just under half his salary, and he largely kept to that commitment. After five years apart, they divorced on the 14th of February 1919.

  Their divorce agreement included an unusual clause: anticipating that Einstein would win the Nobel Prize, it stipulated that he would accept the award and Marić would receive the money. This happened in 1922. Under the terms of the agreement, the prize money was to be held in trust for their sons, with Marić able to draw on the interest but unable to touch the principal without Einstein's permission. Letters released in 2006, sealed by Einstein's stepdaughter Margot Einstein until twenty years after her death, revealed that Marić eventually used the money to purchase three apartment buildings in Zürich. She lived in one of them, a five-story house at Huttenstrasse 62.

• 7. Eduard and the End

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  Around 1930, when Eduard Einstein was approximately twenty years old, he suffered a breakdown and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The costs of his care at the University of Zürich's psychiatric clinic, known as the Burghölzli, mounted steadily through the late 1930s. To meet them, Marić sold two of her three apartment buildings. In 1939 she transferred ownership of the Huttenstrasse house to Einstein to prevent it from being lost, retaining power of attorney over the property.

  Mileva Marić suffered a severe stroke and died on the 4th of August 1948 in Zürich at age 72. She was buried at the Nordheim-Cemetery in the city. Eduard remained institutionalized until his death in 1965.

  In 2005, the ETH and the Gesellschaft zu Fraumünster honoured Marić in Zürich, unveiling a memorial plaque on the house at Huttenstrasse 62 where she had lived. A bust was placed that same year in Sremska Mitrovica, the town where she had attended gymnasium. A memorial gravestone was dedicated at the Nordheim-Cemetery in June 2009, sixty years after her death. In 2019, the physicist and writer Gabriella Greison applied to the ETH Zürich for the posthumous award of a degree to Marić; after four months of discussions, the university declined.