Mileva Marić Einstein

On December 19, 2016,  exactly 141 years after the birth of Mileva Marić Einstein in 1875, The Overlooked Genius of Mileva Marić, Einstein’s First Wife was published to Scientific American and the author is listed as Pauline Gagnon. 

It was posted to the overwhelmingly male forum Hacker News on November 2, 2020 with the title The Life of Einstein's First Wife where I participated a great deal in the discussion, more than I really wanted to to defend myself in the face of ugly personal attacks that were the norm for my experiences there.

I recently referenced that in posts on two different blogs of mine.

Mileva Einstein

Toddler Speech (in the footnote)

Wikipedia's List of things named after Albert Einstein has a section titled Scientific and mathematical concepts. Many of them list other people alongside him:

Bose–Einstein condensate

Bose–Einstein correlations

Bose–Einstein statistics

Einstein aether theory

Einstein's equivalence principle

Einstein frame

Einstein's mass–energy relation

Einstein gravitational constant

Einstein's radius of the universe

Einstein (unit)

Einstein notation

Einstein coefficients

Einstein's cosmological constant

Einstein relation (kinetic theory)

Planck–Einstein relation

Einstein–Brillouin–Keller method

Einstein–Cartan theory

Einstein–Hopf drag

Einstein–de Haas effect

Einstein–Maxwell–Dirac equations

Einstein–de Sitter universe

Einstein–Hermitian vector bundle

Einstein–Hilbert action

Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox

Einstein–Rosen bridge

Einstein–Rosen metric

Einstein shift

Einstein–Schrödinger equation

Einstein Cross

Einstein field equations

Einstein function

Einstein's light box

Einstein model

Einstein manifold

Einstein radius

Einstein group

Einstein ring

Einstein–Infeld–Hoffmann equations

Einstein synchronisation

Einstein tensor

Einstein zigzag[1]

Einstein's static universe

Friedmann–Einstein universe

Hamilton–Jacobi–Einstein equation

Higher-dimensional Einstein gravity

Kähler–Einstein metric

Wiener–Khinchin–Einstein theorem

Einstein pseudotensor

Stark–Einstein law

Stokes–Einstein equation (translational diffusion)

Stokes–Einstein–Debye equation (rotational diffusion)

Wikipedia says Einstein's field equations for the Theory of Relativity were published in 1915 while he was still married to Mileva and he supposedly admitted she did his math during those years. So I find it difficult to accept those equations were really his.

When you click on in the link for Einstein's radius of the universe you are redirected to Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric. 

And other stuff on the List of things named after Albert Einstein includes streets, schools and buildings. I don't think anyone believes that implies he was somehow personally involved in laying those streets or founding those schools or building those buildings.

Mileva and Albert Einstein divorced in 2019 and her divorce decree apparently stipulated that she would get the prize money if he won the Nobel Prize. And he then was awarded it in 1921, just two years later.

I'm not suggesting Albert Einstein was a con artist who knew nothing about science, but it seems likely to me that Mileva Marić Einstein contributed a great deal more than just "the math" which would already be a very substantial contribution for theoretical physics while people act like that's kind of like her playing secretary and typing up his handwritten papers and making sure there were no typos.

Albert Einstein gets remembered as a mental giant who stood head and shoulders over everyone else alive during his lifetime. The citations above imply that his real strength may have been playing the game and getting credit for it.

It suggests that odds are high that after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he was the name you wanted on your paper or project to get funding and to get people to read it at all. If it said "Einstein" they didn't care who Joe Bob Nobody was. They read it anyway or funded it anyway.

So if you got funding and got published and got partial credit, you probably didn't make a big stink about it if you actually did 75 percent or 90 percent of the work involved. Because you probably weren't going to have any doors open for you without his name attached to it.

From the Wikipedia article on Einstein Refrigerator:

It has been suggested that most of the actual inventing was done by Szilárd, with Einstein merely acting as a consultant and helping with the patent-related paperwork, but others assert that Einstein contributed design work to the project.

Probably only Szilárd and Einstein knew for sure and they are both long dead, yet it's still called the Einstein Refrigerator, not the Einstein-Szilárd Refrigerator. Perhaps that's similar to common sayings frequently being attributed to Mark Twain as if him using them in his writing or whatever means he invented them.

Marie Curie shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband, Pierre Curie, and she won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry following his death. Comments on Hacker News in the discussion linked above indicate that they initially wanted to only put Pierre Curie's name on the first prize.

It seems likely Mileva Marić Einstein knew about that and decided to opt out of the drama and just ask for the money for her work and gave Albert Einstein permission to simply take all the credit and be done with it.

I was a homemaker for a lot of years. My husband had a successful military career while we were married and he pursued college because he was married to me and I tutored him in college math and read his papers and gave him feedback and he had plans to get a PhD and become a university professor.

I left him and my understanding is he left the military shortly after we parted ways. While we were married, he got one Special Duty assignment after another because he was the awesome sauce in the eyes of the military and then he suddenly retired once I was out of the picture and not doing whatever I did that facilitated his career success and he never got a PhD and never became a university professor.

Did he become immediately unemployable? No. He had a very impressive twenty-two year track record of military service and a BOX of awards, enough to completely cover what he called "My I love me wall."

He continued doing similar work post retirement and probably chalked up any lack of brilliance to "I'm older, I've got scars and old injuries and blah blah blah." And probably wasn't just straight up incompetent and was good enough.

And I started life over post divorce with an empty resume and challenges getting a job at all.

Most men make their career reputation in their energetic youth and then continue to get hired for having experience. And women frequently are raising children as their primary job during those same years, even if they aren't full-time homemakers.

They typically work part time or take a pink collar ghetto job or only with intermittently with substantial time off to tend to family. And then never catch up, in part because whatever they accomplished in their youth, it's probably not something they can put on a resume even if it has made their husband's career successful.