In an article in Time magazine in July 2006 Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and former chairman of CNN, stated that Einstein’s first wife Mileva Marić was a “Serbian physicist who had helped him with the math of his 1905 [special relativity] paper”[1]
From the unequivocal way that this information was presented by Isaacson, readers would be forgiven for assuming that this a straightforward factual statement. Yet this is far from the case. For a start, the mathematics in the 1905 relativity paper was quite elementary: as Jürgen Renn, an editor of the Albert Einstein Collected Papers, observes, “If he had needed help with that kind of mathematics, he would have ended there.”[2] Then there is the … Read the rest