Was Einstein's wife responsible for his discoveries?

Mileva Maric’ was Einstein’s wife who is credited by some as the main brain behind his Theory of Relativity. It is usual to discredit the big names.. some times – as in case of Thomas Edison – with some strong reason.. but in this case it seems to be a case of overenthusiasm as is shown in this article!

It is significant that in relation to two instances in which Einstein uses inclusive language Maric’ explicitly states in letters to her close friend Helene Kaufler that the work in question was written by Einstein. In one of these letters she adds, “You can imagine how proud I am of my darling”, and in the other, “I have read this work with great joy and real admiration for my little darling, who has such a clever head.”[11] It is evident that these are not the words of someone who made substantive contributions to the papers in question.

The claim has been made that Maric’ assisted Einstein with mathematical problems relating to his published work, specifically in relation to the 1905 relativity paper. This is negated by the fact that the mathematics used by Einstein in that paper does not go beyond fairly basic algebra and calculus. Moreover, in spite of the fact that Maric’ has been misleadingly described as a “mathematician”, her grade in the maths component of the final diploma exam in 1900 was less than half that of the other four candidates, and it was again her maths that let her down when she failed at the second attempt in 1901.[12]

Aside from his published papers, Einstein’s Collected Papers contain an impressively large mass of letters to friends and to eminent physicists containing discussions of his current work in physics in the years from his student days to the time he and Maric’ separated. Against this there is not a single known document of Maric’’s that contains ideas of her own on such subjects. As Robert Schulmann and Gerald Holton have written: “All serious Einstein scholarship, by Abraham Pais, John Stachel and others, has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided… Nor is there a shred of documentary proof of her originality as a scientist.”