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Comment by qchris | Hacker News Reader

I definitely agree he had a mathematician working with him to help, but am not sure it was his wife. I think that there's varying interpretations of her contributions to A. Einstein's work. If I'm remembering correctly, Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography tended towards says that she didn't truly contribute much to any of the work he did around that time, but that he did have a colleague or two formally trained in non-Euclidean geometries that he spent a lot of time working on GR with.

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It was Marcel Grossman who introduced him to Riemman's work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Grossmann

There is no evidence that his wife provided any of the "mathematical muscle needed for GR", nor is there reason to suspect that she would have been in a position to do so, since she was not a mathematician and had failed the undergraduate physics degree at the institute where she met Einstein (Einstein himself barely passed though).

[0] https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781402039997

> If I'm remembering correctly, Walter Isaacson's Einstein biography tended towards says that she didn't truly contribute much to any of the work he did around that time....

I'm not sure how much credence I'd put in such an assertion given that Einstein himself wrote in a letter to Mileva:

> “When I read Helmholtz for the first time, it seemed so odd that you were not at my side and today, this is not getting better. I find the work we do together very good, healing and also easier.”

Emphasis added by me.

Having not read the book, Isaacson might have some additional evidence and insights I'm not aware of, but who knows?

> “When I read Helmholtz for the first time, it seemed so odd that you were not at my side and today, this is not getting better. I find the work we do together very good, healing and also easier.”

Note that this was written when they were both undergraduate students and would study together.

There are other examples in the SA article I posted, including a letter from 1905 where Einstein talks about their "work on relative motion."

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