Einstein Didn't Flunk Math - rumor control!

[merlyn]

Einstein, who failed fourth grade math and yet managed to express general and special relativity.

Well, not that it undermines your entire argument, but this is false, or so I'm told by some of Einstein's offspring in a letter to the editor of one of the science magazines I was reading in high school.

Apparently, at the school Einstein attended for 4th grade, they had an unusual grading system, where the lower numbers meant the higher grade, so that "1" = very good while "4" = very poor. Einstein got "1"s in math. Some journalist came across this data, and without verifying the context, got the rumor going around that "Einstein flunked 4th grade math", when in fact it was quite the opposite; he'd scored the highest possible grades!

No, sorry, I don't recall the precise source any more, but it was a reputable magazine (Discovery magazine, or Science magazine, or something like that).

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[tilly]

I have run across the same fact, though I am having some trouble finding a link. (Best I can do is the alt.folklore.urban FAQ. Search for Einstein.

The version that I heard was a little more specific. The German school system had 4 is very good and 1 is very poor. The Austrian was reversed. Because this caused confusion the Austrian changed to match the German very shortly after Einstein went through. So when a careless biographer looked at his grades...

However people who want to think of Einstein as some rube from the hicks still can take comfort in the detail that he wound up marrying his first cousin...

[mischief]

I had a quick look, and I found one page that says he didn't, but I couldn't find any sites that said he did (fail 4th grade maths, that is). Personally, I doubt he did fail - how on earth could one of the world's greatest ever minds have a problem?

[jplindstrom]

With mathematics? He probably didn't.

With the school subject "mathematics" (or whatever it was called at the time)? Quite possibly.

/J