Was Einstein bad at math?
No. He excelled at math from childhood and earned top marks. The story that he failed is a myth.
Have you ever flunked a math test and been consoled with, “Well, even Einstein failed math”? The greatest physicist of the 20th century, the man behind relativity, struggled with school math too. What a comforting thought.
Einstein himself, however, flatly denied it. In reality, he was brilliant at math from childhood.
Where the “failed math” story came from
The story was spread by the popular American newspaper feature Ripley’s Believe It or Not! In 1935, when Einstein was living in Princeton, a rabbi brought him a clipping of the column. Its headline: “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.”
Einstein laughed and reportedly replied, “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”
Hooked on geometry at twelve
His love of math ran deep. Records note that in primary school he was at the top of his class in math, far above what the school required. Around the age of twelve, he taught himself algebra and geometry over a summer vacation from textbooks his parents had bought him. Before his thirteenth birthday, he is said to have worked out his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Max Talmud, a medical student who was close to the family, recalled giving the boy a geometry textbook. Young Albert soon worked through the whole book, moved on to higher mathematics, and before long left Talmud unable to follow.
The “failed” exam at sixteen
There is, admittedly, one episode that may have planted the seed of the myth. In 1895, at sixteen, Einstein took the entrance exam for the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich, Switzerland (today’s ETH Zurich). He did not pass. But the part where he fell short was the general section, which included languages, while in math and physics he performed with distinction.
On the advice of the school’s principal, he spent a year finishing his schooling at the cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland. On the certificate he received in 1896, algebra, geometry, descriptive geometry, physics, and history all show a 6, the top mark on a six-point scale. French, on the other hand, was a 3.
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At this school, 6 was the best grade and 1 the worst. One theory holds that someone reading the certificate assumed the opposite, that 1 was best, and that this gave rise to the myth, but nobody knows for sure. Either way, that same fall, Einstein entered the Federal Polytechnic at seventeen, enrolling in the program to become a teacher of mathematics and physics.
Math that challenged even a genius
That is not to say Einstein never struggled with math. What gave him trouble was not school math but mathematics at the very frontier.
While trying to build his theory of gravity, Einstein got stuck on the geometry of curved space that the theory required. He turned to Marcel Grossmann, a friend from his university days who had become a mathematician. With Grossmann’s help he mastered the new mathematics, and in 1915 Einstein finally completed his general theory of relativity.
In 1943, late in his life, Einstein replied to a girl who had written to confess that she was struggling with math:
Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater.
The genius who was good at math still had to fight his way forward past the limits of his own ability. That may be a far more encouraging story than the legend of his failing grade.