A Truly Beautiful Mind

The pair finally married in January 1903, and had two sons. But a few years later,the marriage faltered.

Mileva, meanwhile, was losing her intellectual ambition and becoming an unhappy housewife. After years of constant fighting, the couple finally divorced in 1919. Einstein married his cousin Elsa the same year.

While Einstein was solving the most difficult problems in physics, his private life was unravelling.

Albert had wanted to marry Mileva right after finishing his studies, but his mother was against it. She thought Mileva, who was three years older than her son, was too old for him. She was also bothered by Mileva’s intelligence.

One of the famous papers of 1905 was Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, according to which time and distance are not absolute.

Indeed, two perfectly accurate clocks will not continue to show the same time if they come together again after a journey if one of them has been moving very fast relative to the other.

In 1900, at the age of 21, Albert Einstein was a university graduate and unemployed.

He finally secured a job in 1902 as a technical expert in the patent office in Bern. While he was supposed to be assessing other people’s inventions, Einstein was actually developing his own ideas in secret.

He also felt a special interest in a fellow student, Mileva Maric, whom he found to be a “clever creature.”

This young Serb had come to Switzerland because the University in Zurich was one of the few in Europe where women could get degrees. Einstein saw in her an ally against the “philistines”— those people in his family and at the university with whom he was constantly at odds.

Einstein was highly gifted in mathematics and interested in physics, and after finishing school, he decided to study at a university in Zurich.

Albert Einstein was born on 14 March,1879 in the German city of Ulm.

At the age of two-and-a-half, Einstein still wasn’t talking. When he finally did learn to speak, he uttered everything twice. Einstein did not know what to do with other children, and his playmates called him “Brother Boring".

He especially loved mechanical toys. Looking at his newborn sister, Maja, he is said to have said: “Fine, but where are her wheels?”

A headmaster once told his father that what Einstein chose as a profession wouldn’t matter, because 'He’ll never make a success at anything.”

He went to high school in Munich, where Einstein’s family had moved when he was 15 months old, and scored good marks in almost every subject.

Einstein hated the school’s regimentation, and often clashed with his teachers. At the age of 15, Einstein felt so stifled there that he left the school for good.

After prolonged discussion, Einstein got his wish to continue his education in German-speaking Switzerland, in a city which was more liberal than Munich.