Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879. Beginning with a flurry of papers in 1905, he turned classical physics on its head with his special and general theories of relativity, which revolutionized scientists’ understanding of everything from space and time to gravity and energy. Einstein’s groundbreaking scientific ideas made his name a synonym for genius, but he was also famous for his pacifist views and support of the civil rights movement. Below, explore nine surprising facts about one of the towering minds of the 20th century.
Einstein didn’t fail math as a child.
Underachieving school kids have long taken solace in the claim that Einstein flunked math as a youth, but the records show that he was actually an exceptional, if not reluctant, student. He scored high grades during his school days in Munich, and was only frustrated by what he described as the “mechanical discipline” demanded by his teachers. The future Nobel Laureate dropped out of school at age 15 and left Germany to avoid state-mandated military service, but before then he was consistently at the top of his class and was even considered something of a prodigy for his grasp of complex mathematical and scientific concepts. When later presented with a news article claiming he’d failed grade-school math, Einstein dismissed the story as a myth and said, “Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”
Albert Einstein at age 14.
No one knows what happened to his first daughter.
In 1896, Einstein renounced his German citizenship and enrolled at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. There, he began a passionate love affair with Mileva Maric, a fellow physicist-in-training originally from Serbia. The couple later married and had two sons after graduating, but a year before they tied the knot, Maric gave birth to an illegitimate daughter named Lieserl. Einstein never spoke about the child to his family, and biographers weren’t even aware of her existence until examining his private papers in the late-1980s. Her fate remains a mystery to this day. Some scholars think Lieserl died from scarlet fever in 1903, while others believe she survived the sickness and was given up for adoption in Maric’s native Serbia.
Book cover for “Einstein’s Daughter: The Search for Lieserl” by Michele Zackheim.
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