Einstein promised his Nobel money to his ex-wife before he had won it
When Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić divorced on 14 February 1919, part of the settlement said that if he ever won a Nobel Prize, the cash would go to her. It was a bet on his own future, and it paid off: two years later he received the physics prize for the photoelectric effect.
Einstein was born in Ulm on 14 March 1879 to secular Jewish parents; the family soon moved to Munich, where his father and uncle made direct-current electrical equipment. He was so slow to talk that his parents feared a learning problem. At five, sick in bed, he was given a compass by his father, and the needle's invisible guidance convinced him that something deeply hidden lay behind things. By twelve he was teaching himself algebra and geometry, and he found his own proof of Pythagoras' theorem before turning thirteen.
School suited him badly. When the family business lost a Munich lighting contract, largely because it could not afford to switch to alternating current, his parents moved to Italy and left the fifteen-year-old behind to finish at a gymnasium whose rote learning he despised. A doctor's letter soon got him out. At sixteen he sat the entrance exam for the Zurich polytechnic and failed the general section, though he shone in physics and mathematics, so he spent a year at a cantonal school in Aarau first. To avoid military service he gave up his German citizenship in 1896.
At the polytechnic he met Mileva Marić, the only woman among the five other first-year students on his course. They studied physics together beyond the lectures and fell in love; historians still disagree about how much she shaped his early ideas. Letters published in 1987 revealed a daughter, Lieserl, born in 1902, whose fate remains unknown. The couple married in 1903 and had two sons before separating in 1914.
Working at the patent office in Bern, he published four landmark papers in 1905, covering the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and the equivalence of mass and energy. General relativity followed in 1915. Visiting the United States when Hitler took power in 1933, he stayed, and became an American citizen in 1940. He resisted quantum randomness to the end and died on 18 April 1955.
Source: Albert Einstein
