Mileva Marić

Mileva Marić (Serbian Cyrillic Милева Марић; , occasionally especially on official documents also in the Hungarian notation Mileva Marity; † August 4, 1948 in Zurich, Switzerland; born December 19, 1875 in title, Vojvodina, Austria - Hungary, now Serbia) was Albert Einstein's fellow student at the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich and his first wife. Maric was the first Serbian woman and one of the first women ever who completed a math and physics studies.

Life

Maric came from a wealthy Serbian family from Vojvodina, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. It was heavily promoted by her father, who had recognized their intellectual skills in their training and first visited the Serbian girls' high school in Novi Sad, then the secondary school and the Royal Serbian Grammar School in Sabac. When her family moved to Zagreb, she moved to the local high school. Later, she continued her education in Switzerland continued at the Higher Girls' School City of Zurich and finally put in Bern from the Matura.

She enrolled at the University of Zurich for the study of medicine, but switched after one semester at the Federal Polytechnic, later the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ( ETH), where in 1896, for the study of mathematics and physics, as the only woman in her class enrolled and attended the same lectures as Albert Einstein, with whom she was close friends soon. In the winter semester 1897/98 she studied at the University of Heidelberg and returned in April 1898 back to the Polytechnic. In 1899 she passed the first test, while it subsequently did not pass the final examination in the year. In 1901 she became pregnant by Einstein. She repeated the diploma examination, three months pregnant, but was not even the second time.

In 1902, the illegitimate daughter of Marić and Einstein, Lieserl called, in Vojvodina, where Maric's family lived, to the world. The fate of the child is not known; either it fell ill and died in 1903 or was given up for adoption.

1903 Marić and Einstein married against the wishes of Einstein's mother in Bern, in 1904 her son Hans Albert was born. Between 1905 and 1912, followed Marić Einstein to Zurich, Prague and back to Zurich, where their second son Eduard was born in 1910.

Since 1912, Einstein introduced a secret correspondence with his future second wife, Elsa. 1914 parted Einstein and Marić that. With the sons of Berlin, where she had lived for several months with Einstein, moved back to Zurich From Berlin, Einstein in 1915 and again in 1918 tried Mileva to move to divorce, among other things, with the promise that he her, he should get the Nobel Prize, the prize money will leave. The couple divorced on February 14, 1919 due to " natural intolerance " at the District Court of Zurich.

Marić and her sons lived in the result in modest circumstances. When Einstein the 1922 Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 was awarded for " achievements in the field of theoretical physics," she received in accordance with the divorce agreement, the prize money, with which they acquired among others, a property on Huttenstrasse 62 in the upper rhinestone district of Zurich. The treatment of her son with schizophrenia Eduard devoured a large part of the sum. Marić took care of her son Edward, until she died in 1948 lonely in a private clinic in Zurich. She is buried in the cemetery Nordheim in Zurich.

Theses

As far as is known today, has left no Marić own scientific work. Since the publication of the first volume of the " Collected Papers of Albert Einstein" in 1987 and in 1992 published exchange of letters between her and Einstein from 1897 to 1903, however, occasionally speculated about the extent of their contribution to Einstein's work, in particular those of the miracle year of 1905. Allegations after which they should be considered as co-author, or even as the actual author of Einstein's early writings, have been put forward, among others, of Senta Trömel - Plötz and the physicist Evan Harris Walker. Both are supported here in part to the Marić biography of Desanka Trbuhović - Gjuric. More criticism of an allegedly insufficient consideration of the qualifications and achievements of Marić in previous biographies were also expressed about particular by feminist. The proponents of the thesis, Marić had substantially contributed to Einstein's work, based mainly on the Russian physicist Abram Joffe F., who wrote in 1955, the name of the author of the three famous lost original manuscripts of 1905 was " Einstein Marity " was. Joffe said that it was customary in Switzerland that married men the birth names of their wives - Marity was the name Maric led to documents - to be added to its name, but this is not the case. In addition, there is evidence that Marić collaborated closely after 1905 Einstein; for example, seven pages of handwritten lecture notes Einstein to analytical mechanics of 1910 in Maric's handwriting are written. It is often also referred to the exchange of letters between Einstein and Marić, in the Einstein repeatedly of " our work " speaks, and that Einstein had to the fact get the prize money of the Nobel Prize his divorced wife in Zurich.

These and other interpretations and assertions were disputed by physicists and historians of science such as John Stachel, Abraham Pais, Gerald Holton, Armin Hermann and Alberto A. Martinez. In their view, the existing sources do not allow the conclusion that Marić had a significant proportion of Einstein's work. In their eyes, they met at best the function of a " sounding board " for Einstein's ideas by supporting him through critical listening and professional questioning his remarks, like his friend Michele Besso.

Honors

In 2005, was honored by the ETH and the society woman Münster as a " co-developer of the theory of relativity " Mileva Maric in Zurich, and at the house Huttenstrasse 62, her residence in Zurich, was attached to her memory a blackboard. Was 60 years after her death in 2008 at the house of the former hospital Eos at the Carmen Street 18 in Zurich, died in Marić, also mounted a plaque, in June 2009, followed by another in the cemetery Nordheim, Maric's final resting place.

In Novi Sad and other places of Vojvodina are busts Maric, in her hometown title, a school was named after her. Her life was also processed in literature, as in the novel Mileva Marić Ajnštajn of Dragana Bukumirović of 1995 and in the drama Mileva Ajnštajn of Vida Ognjenović from the year 1998.