Mileva Marić was a Serbian mathematician, one of the first women to study physics and mathematics in Europe, and the first wife (1903–1919) of Albert Einstein. 

In the autumn of 1896, Marić attended to the Zurich Polytechnic. She enrolled for a diploma course to teach physics and mathematics in secondary schools at the same time as Albert Einstein. Her studies included the following courses: differential and integral calculus, descriptive and projective geometry, mechanics, theoretical physics, applied physics, experimental physics, and astronomy. She was the only woman in her group of six students, and only the fifth woman to study mathematics and physics at the Polytechnic. She and Einstein became close friends quite soon.

On her intermediate diploma exam in 1899, Marić placed her fifth out of six students, achieving a grade average of 5.05 (on scale 1–6). Einstein had come top of the group with a grade average of 5.7. In physics, however, she got 5½, the same as Einstein.

But in 1900, Marić failed her Zurich Polytechnic teaching diploma examination. Her academic career was then disrupted in 1901 when she became pregnant by Einstein. When three months pregnant, she resat the diploma examination, but failed for the second time without improving her grade. She also discontinued work on her diploma dissertation that she had hoped to develop into a Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of the physics professor Heinrich Weber. Her daughter, Lieserl, was born in 1902, but her fate is unknown: she may have died in late summer 1903, or been given up for adoption.

In 1903 Marić and Einstein married in Bern, Switzerland, where Einstein had found a job at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property. In 1904 their first son Hans Albert was born. The Einsteins lived in Bern until 1909, when Einstein got a teaching position at the University of Zürich. In 1910 their second son Eduard was born. In July 1913 Max Planck and Walther Nernst asked Einstein to accept to come to Berlin, which he did, but which caused Marić distress. In the summer of 1914, she took the boys back to Zurich, to a boarding house, never to return to Albert.

The couple divorced on February 14, 1919. They had negotiated a settlement whereby the Nobel Prize money that Einstein anticipated he would soon receive was to be placed in trust for their two boys.

There are no strong arguments to support the idea that Marić helped Einstein to develop his theories. Other Nobel winners, besides Einstein, have shared their prize money with their ex-wives as a part of their divorce settlements. The couple's own son, Hans Albert, stated that on marrying Einstein, his mother immediately gave up her own scientific work. Einstein remained an extremely fruitful scientist well into the 1920s, producing work of the greatest importance long after separating from Marić in 1914. She, on the other hand, never published anything, and Marić was never mentioned as having been involved with his work by the friends and colleagues of Einstein, who engaged in countless discussions of his ideas with him. And perhaps most notably, Marić herself never claimed that she had ever played any role in Einstein's scientific work, nor even hinted at any such role in personal letters to her closest friend Helene Savić.

Sources

• Wikipedia Contributors, Mileva Marić, Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Accessed 11 July 2009.