The Einstein You Don't Know

How many famous female scientists can you name? Marie Curie? Jane Goodall? What about the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin? Or the cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock? Or the inventor and movie star, Hedy LaMarr? Remembered or not, they all made contributions but there are so many women who never got that far. Women who started out in science, but then got shut out because they were the wrong gender.

One of those was Albert Einstein's first wife, Mileva Marić-Einstein. She might just have been more brilliant than he was — but we'll never know. Marie Benedict wrote a wonderful novel about her called The Other Einstein that brings a fictionalized young Mileva back to campus as a young college student with a young Albert as her classmate.