What do you think of this fact?
“Even Einstein failed math.” That line has cheered up a lot of students. Too bad it isn’t true.
The newspaper item from 1935
According to Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson, the claim even made it into a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! column. The headline: “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.”
In 1935, a rabbi in Princeton showed Einstein the clipping. Einstein laughed. He had never failed in math, he said, and had mastered differential and integral calculus before he was 15.
A summer full of geometry
His school records back him up. In primary school, he was top of his class and well above the math requirements. At the age of 12, he taught himself geometry and algebra over the summer holidays, using textbooks his parents had bought in advance. He worked through the proofs and came up with his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
It wasn’t completely smooth sailing, though. When he applied to the Polytechnic School in Zurich, he was two years younger than the other applicants. He did well in math and physics but poorly in the other subjects. So he wasn’t admitted at first and finished school in the Swiss canton of Aargau.
Bonus fact: In 1896, Aargau flipped its grading scale so that a 1 suddenly became the worst grade. According to Ripley’s, that may have helped people later mistake good grades for bad ones.
The myth lives on anyway. According to Isaacson, a Google search for it already returned over 500,000 results back in 2007.
So if you’ve got a bad math grade, you’ll need a different excuse. Einstein isn’t available for that one.