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Mileva Maric
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Mileva Maric (December 19, 1875 – August 4, 1948; Serbian Cyrillic: ?????? ?????) was the Serbian first wife (1903–1919) of Albert Einstein, and one of the first women to study physics and mathematics in Europe.
Personal life
On December 19, 1875, Mileva Maric was born into a wealthy family in Titel, in the province of Vojvodina (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in the Republic of Serbia).
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Encyclopedia
Mileva Maric (December 19, 1875 – August 4, 1948; Serbian Cyrillic: ?????? ?????) was the Serbian first wife (1903–1919) of Albert Einstein, and one of the first women to study physics and mathematics in Europe.
Personal life
On December 19, 1875, Mileva Maric was born into a wealthy family in Titel, in the province of Vojvodina (then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, today in the Republic of Serbia). She was the oldest of three children. Shortly after her birth, her father ended his military career and took a job at the court in Ruma and later in Zagreb.
She began her secondary education in 1886 at a high school for girls in Novi Sad., but changed the following year to a high school in Sremska Mitrovica.
Beginning in 1890, she attended the Royal Serbian Grammar School in Sabac. In 1891 her father obtained special permission to enroll Maric as a private student at the all male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb. She passed the entrance exam and entered the tenth grade in 1892. She won special permission to attend physics lectures in February 1894 and passed the final exams in September 1894. Her grades in mathematics and physics were the highest awarded.. That year she fell seriously ill and decided to move to Switzerland, where on the 14th November she started at the "Girls High School" in Zurich. In 1896, Maric passed her Matura-Exam, and started studying medicine at the University of Zurich for one semester.
In October Maric went to Heidelberg to study at Heidelberg University for the winter semester 1897/98, attending physics and mathematics lectures as an auditor. She rejoined the Zurich Polytechnic in April 1898, where she studied theory of numbers, analytical mechanics, differential and integral calculus, elliptical functions, theory of heat, electrodynamics. Because of the semester spent in Heidelberg, Maric sat the intermediate diploma exam in 1899, one year later than the rest of her group, achieving a grade average of 5.05 (on scale 1–6). This placed her fifth out of six students; Einstein had come top of the group with a grade average of 5.7. In physics, however, she got 5.5 – the same as Einstein.
But in 1900, Maric failed her Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma examination. In "theory of functions" her grade [5 on a scale 1–12] was less than half that of the other four candidates, and her grade average was 4.00 compared with Einstein's 4.91.
Maric's academic career was disrupted in 1901 when she became pregnant by Einstein. When three months pregnant, she resat the diploma examination, but failed for the second time without improving her grade. She also discontinued work on her diploma dissertation that she had hoped to develop into a Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of the physics professor Heinrich Weber. She went to Novi Sad, where her daughter, Lieserl, was born in 1902, probably in January. Her fate is unknown: she may have died in late summer 1903, or been given up for adoption.
In 1903 Maric and Einstein married in Bern, Switzerland, where Einstein had found a job at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property. In 1904 their first son Hans Albert was born. The Einsteins lived in Bern until 1909, when Einstein got a teaching position at the University of Zürich. In 1910 their second son Eduard was born. In 1911 they moved to Prague, where Einstein held a teaching position at the German University. A year later, they returned to Zurich, as Einstein had accepted a professorship at his alma mater.
In July 1913 Max Planck and Walther Nernst asked Einstein to accept to come to Berlin, which he did, but which caused Maric distress. In August the Einsteins took a walking holiday with their son Hans Albert, Marie Curie and her two daughters, but Maric was delayed temporarily due to Eduard's illness. In September the Einsteins visited Maric's parents near Novi Sad, and on the day they were to leave for Vienna Maric had her sons baptised as Orthodox Christians. After Vienna Einstein visited relatives in Germany while Maric returned to Zurich. After Christmas she traveled to Berlin to stay with Fritz Haber who helped her look for accommodation for the Einsteins' impending move in April 1914. The Einsteins both left Zurich for Berlin in late March, on the way Einstein visited an uncle in Antwerp and then Ehrenfest and Lorentz in Leiden while Maric took a holiday with the children in Locarno, arriving in Berlin in mid-April. In May Ehrenfest noted that Maric was pining for Switzerland, and in summer she took the boys back to Zurich, to a boarding house, never to return to Albert. By the end of 1914 the couple's friends realised the marriage had collapsed; Maric moved to a flat on Voltastrasse and Einstein promised her an annual maintenance of 5600 Reichsmarks
The couple divorced on February 14, 1919. They had negotiated a settlement whereby the Nobel Prize money that Einstein anticipated he would soon receive was to be placed in trust for their two boys, while Maric would be able to draw on the interest, but have no authority over the capital without Einstein's permission, After Einstein married his second wife in June, he returned to Zurich to talk to Maric about the children's future, taking Hans Albert on Lake Constance and Eduard to Arosa for convalescence.
In 1922, Einstein received news that he had won the Nobel Prize in November and the money was transferred to Maric in 1923. The money was used to buy three houses in Zurich: Maric lived in one, a five story house at Huttenstrasse 62, the other two were investments. The family of Georg Busch, later to become Professor at the ETH, was one of her tenants. In the late 1930s the costs of Eduard's care — he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia — and institutionalized at the University of Zurich psychiatric hospital "Burghölzli"; overwhelmed Maric and resulted in the forced sale of two of the houses. In 1939 Maric agreed to transfer ownership of the Huttenstrasse house to Einstein in order to prevent its loss as well, with Maric retaining power of attorney. Einstein also made regular cash transfers to Maric for Eduard's and her own livelihood.
Mileva Maric died at the age of 72 on August 4, 1948 in Zurich.
Role in physics
Annus Mirabilis papers
The question whether (and if so, to what extent) Maric contributed anything at all to Einstein's Annus Mirabilis Papers is controversial. However, the overwhelming consensus, among professional American historians of science, is that she did not.
The case which has been presented for Maric as a co-author of some of Einstein's early work, putatively culminating in the 1905 papers, mostly depends on the following supposed evidence:
(i) Letters in which Einstein referred to "our" theory and "our" work. However, (a) these letters were written in their student days, at least four years before the 1905 papers, (b) the few instances in which Einstein used "our" to relate to scientific work specifically refer to their student diploma dissertations, for which they both chose the same topic (e.g. heat conductivity), and (c), as John Stachel has shown from a close examination of the letters, the other occasions that Einstein used "our" were quite general statements usually in periods he was seeking to assure Maric of his love when they were separated, while he invariably used "I" and "my" when he recounted ideas he was working on. For instance, "the letters to Maric show Einstein referring to his studies, his work on the electrodynamics of moving bodies over a dozen times, as compared to one reference to our on the problem of relative motion." In two cases where there are surviving letters from Maric in direct reply to ones from Einstein in which he had recounted his latest ideas, she gives no response at all. Her letters, in contrast to Einstein's, contain only personal matters, or comments related to her Polytechnic coursework. Stachel writes: "In her case 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. We do not even have hearsay accounts of conversations she had with anyone else that have a specific, scientific content, let alone claiming to report her ideas."
(ii) The divorce agreement in which Einstein promised her his Nobel Prize money. However, Einstein made this proposal to persuade a reluctant Maric to agree to divorce him, and under the terms of the agreement the money was to be held in trust for their two boys, while she was able to draw on the interest. Based on newly released letters (sealed by Einstein's stepgranddaughter Margot Einstein until 20 years after her death), Walter Isaacson reported that Maric eventually invested the Nobel Prize money in three apartment buildings in Zurich.
(iii) The contention that the Soviet scientist Abraham Joffe claimed to have seen Maric’s name on the original manuscripts of Einstein’s 1905 papers. However, Joffe clearly attributes the 1905 papers to a single author who at the time worked at the Patent Office in Bern. Joffe identifies Einstein as Einstein-Marity, the name by which he seems to have presumed that Einstein was officially known in Switzerland at that time. This is clearly a single name, not two separate names. Some Einstein specialists state that there is no justification for saying that Joffe claimed the articles were co-authored nor any evidence that Joffe saw the original papers.
Santa Troemel-Ploetz , following Trbuhovic-Gjuric, bases much of her evidence on the uncritical acceptance of third-hand or fourth-hand reports obtained from friends and acquaintances of the Maric family some 60 years after the events in question, described by Highfield as "home-town folklore", collected by an author who wrote of her pride in "our great Serbian woman".
There are no strong arguments to support the idea that Maric helped Einstein to develop his theories. Other Nobel winners, besides Einstein, have shared their prize money with their ex-wives as a part of their divorce settlements. The couple's own son, Hans Albert, stated that on marrying Einstein, his mother immediately gave up her own scientific work. Einstein remained an extremely fruitful scientist well into the 1920s, producing work of the greatest importance long after separating from Maric in 1914. She, on the other hand, never published anything, and Maric was never mentioned as having been involved with his work by the friends and colleagues of Einstein, who engaged in countless discussions of his ideas with him. And perhaps most notably, Maric herself never claimed that she had ever played any role in Einstein's scientific work, nor even hinted at any such role in personal letters to her closest friend Helene Savic.
Memorials to Mileva Maric
There are three known sculptoral busts of Mileva Maric, and a few memory reliefs (mostly on houses where she lived). They are located in different towns in Vojvodina, Serbia and in Zurich, Switzerland. The newest of the busts, one in her high-school town, Sremska Mitrovica, was placed in December 2005. Another bust is located on the campus of the University of Novi Sad. A high-school in her birth town Titel is also named after her.
See also
External links
- Review: A critical discussion of the PBS "Einstein's Wife" film and website by [https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Links.html A. A. Martinez] is here: [https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Maric_files/EvidenceMaric.pdf Handling evidence in history: the case of Einstein's Wife], School Science Review, March 2005, 86(316), pp. 49-56.
- Critical comments by the Einstein specialists who were interviewed for the film can be seen in a posted on an American Physical Society website, and, in more detail, .
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- (Tesla Society.com)
- (Tesla Society.com)
- at
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