Mileva Marić (Serbian Cyrillic: Милева Марић, pronounced [milěːva mǎːritɕ]; 19 December 1875 – 4 August 1948), sometimes called Mileva Marić-Einstein (Милева Марић-Ајнштајн, Mileva Marić-Ajnštajn), was a Serbian mathematician. She was also the first wife of Albert Einstein from 1903 to 1919. She was the only woman among Einstein's fellow students at Zurich Polytechnic. Marić and Einstein were study colleagues and lovers, and had a daughter Lieserl in 1902, who likely died of scarlet fever at one and a half years old. They later had two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard. The question of whether she contributed to Einstein's early work (in particular the annus mirabilis papers) has been debated.
Biography Marić was born into a wealthy Serbian family on 19 December 1875 in Titel, a town in Bács-Bodrog County, Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire. She was the eldest of three children born to Miloš Marić (1846–1922) and Marija Ružić-Marić (1847–1935). She began her secondary education in 1886 at a high school for girls in Novi Sad, but changed the following year to the Mitrovica Gymnasium in Sremska Mitrovica. Beginning in 1890, Marić attended the Royal Serbian Grammar School in Šabac. In 1891, her father obtained special permission to enroll Marić as a private student at the all-male Royal Classical High School in Zagreb. Her mathematics teacher was Vladimir Varićak. 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 highest grades were in mathematics and physics, both "very good", one grade below the highest "excellent". That year she fell seriously ill and decided to move to Switzerland, where on 14 November she started at the Girls High School in Zurich. In 1896, she passed her Matura-Exam, and started studying medicine at the University of Zurich for one semester. In the fall of 1896, Marić switched to the Zurich Polytechnic (later Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, ETH), having passed the mathematics entrance examination with an average grade of 4.25 (scale 1–6). She enrolled for the diploma course to teach physics and mathematics in secondary schools (section VIA) at the same time as Albert Einstein. She was the only woman in her group of six students, and the fifth woman to enter that section. Marić and Einstein became close friends quite soon. In October, Marić went to Heidelberg to study at Heidelberg University for the winter semester of 1897/98, attending physics and mathematics lectures as an auditor. She rejoined the Zurich Polytechnic in April 1898, where her studies included the following courses: differential and integral calculus, descriptive and projective geometry, mechanics, theoretical physics, applied physics, experimental physics, and astronomy. She sat for the intermediate diploma examinations in 1899, one year later than the other students in her group. Her grade average of 5.05 (scale 1–6) placed her fifth out of the six students taking the examinations that year. Marić's grade in physics was 5.5 (the same as Einstein's). In 1900, she failed the final teaching diploma examinations with a grade average of 4.00, having obtained only grade 2.5 in the mathematics component (theory of functions). Marić's academic career was disrupted when she became pregnant by Einstein on a short holiday in Italy in May 1901. When three months pregnant, she resat the diploma examination, but failed for the second time without improving her grade. She discontinued work on her diploma dissertation that she had hoped to develop into a PhD thesis under the supervision of the physics professor Heinrich Weber and returned home to Serbia to birth and care for their daughter.
Debate over collaboration with Einstein
The question whether (and if so, to what extent) Marić contributed to Albert Einstein's early work, and to the annus mirabilis papers in particular, is a subject of debate. Many historians of physics argue that she made no significant scientific contribution, while others suggest that she was a supportive companion in science and may have helped him materially in his research, and there is also a possibility of them developing the scientific concepts together when they were still students.
Debate over co-authorship Debate over whether Marić was a co-author of some of Einstein's early work, putatively culminating in the 1905 papers, is based on a passage from Russian physicist Abram Joffe's personal memoirs:
In 1905, three articles appeared in the 'Annalen der Physik', which began three very important branches of 20th century physics. Those were the theory of Brownian motion, the photon theory of light, and the theory of relativity. The author of these articles – an unknown person at that time, was a bureaucrat at the Patent Office in Bern, Einstein-Marity (Marity the maiden name of his wife, which by Swiss custom is added to the husband's family name). Proponents claim that Joffe was erroneously attributing the addition of the name Marity, Marić's official name, to a "non-existent" Swiss custom. Others have argued that it is unlikely Joffe saw the papers before they were published, and also unlikely he would have remembered the exact name on the papers if he did. Mileva told a Serbian friend, referring to 1905, that "we finished some important work that will make my husband world famous." Historians Roger Highfield and Paul Woodson argue that this statement is "hometown folklore".
Debate over collaboration Some of the debate over whether Marić collaborated with Einstein is based on their letters:
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