Authors: Walter Isaacson
27 Vacationing on the Baltic Sea, 1928
28 Connecting to the cosmos
29 With Elsa and her daughter Margot, Berlin 1929
30 Margot and Ilse Einstein at the house in Caputh, 1929
31 In Caputh with his son Hans Albert and grandson Bernhard, 1932
32 At the Mt. Wilson Observatory near Caltech, discovering that the universe is expanding, January 1931
33 Sailing against the prevailing currents, Long Island Sound, 1936
34 Welcoming Hans Albert to America, 1937
35 Margot, Einstein, and Helen Dukas being sworn in as U.S. citizens, October 1940
36 Receiving a telescope in the backyard of 112 Mercer Street, underneath the picture window built for his study
37 With Kurt Gödel in Princeton, 1950
38 Princeton, 1953
*
The official name of the institution was the Eidgenössische Polytechnische Schule. In 1911, it gained the right to grant doctoral degrees and changed its name to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, referred to as the ETH. Einstein, then and later, usually called it the Züricher Polytechnikum, or the Zurich Polytechnic.
*
The phrase “valiant Swabian,” used often by Einstein to refer to himself, comes from the poem “Swabian Tale” by Ludwig Uhland.
*
The letters were discovered by John Stachel of the Einstein Papers Project among a cache of four hundred family letters that were stored in a California safe deposit box by the second wife of Einstein’s son Hans Albert Einstein, whose first wife had brought them to California after she went to Zurich to clean out Mileva Mari
’s apartment following her death in 1948.
*
Once married, she usually used the name Mileva Einstein-Mari
. After they were divorced, she eventually resumed using Mileva Mari
. To avoid confusion, I refer to her as Mari
throughout.