Hi I'm Toby and welcome back. Today I'd like to show you through the report card
of none other than the famous Albert Einstein. I have his grades here from the
end of high school as well as during his time at University and I'd like to take
a bit of a look through with you to see what Einstein was really like as a
student. There's a bit of a myth that goes around that Einstein was really bad
at math and failed that at school but from having a look at his grades we will
see that Einstein was actually a pretty good student, although his grades aren't
perfect and his time as a student wasn't without struggle. Looking at Einstein's
grades reveals interesting information about his life, his teachers and what was
going on in physics at the time. As well as Einstein's school and university
grades I also have how his grades compared to his classmates at the time
and also the grades of his first wife who he met while studying at university.
So with that let's have a look. Just so we know the timeline here, when Einstein
was 16½ in 1895 he actually tried to get into the ETH University in Zurich
Switzerland but he failed the entrance exam. The normal age that you have to be
to even take the entrance exam is 18 so he was trying to get in early.
The entrance exam had a scientific section which Einstein apparently did quite well
on as well as a general section which was his downfall. Apparently he got quite
low grades in the linguistics questions. After that disappointment Einstein
enrolls in the Aargau* School which is a secondary school near Zurich in
Switzerland where he will continue his education and graduating from this
school would allow him to be directly admitted to ETH without having to do the
entrance exam again. So this first document I have here is Einstein's final
grades from his year at the Aargau school. Herr Albert Einstein from Ulm,
which is the town in Germany that he was from, born on the 14th of March
1879, that's Pi Day the 14th of March, attended the Canton school in Aargau.
You might have noticed this is all in German so I'm giving you a bit of a
translation although I don't speak German myself. These are the subjects
that he took and his grade. Now a grade of 6 is the highest one obtainable, it
would mean very good and a grade of 1 would be very poor. So we can see he's
taken German language and literature, French, English, Italian, history, geography,
algebra, he's got a 6 there, geometry including trigonometry and analytic
geometry, a 6 as well the highest score, descriptive geometry, physics, again a 6.
So he looks like a pretty good student here at those subjects, chemistry a
little bit lower, a 5. Natural History, art drawing and technical drawing. So his
lowest grade here from when he was leaving school would have been French at
only a 3 out of 6, but he clearly a very good student at the scientific
math and physics subjects. And there we go he graduates from the school in
October 1896 allowing him to go straight to ETH and this here is his grade record
from his whole time there at University. Albert Einstein. On the front of the
grade record here this is referring to the entrance exam and ordinarily they
would write your entrance scores here but since he was able to have direct
entry from school that is empty and we just have his admission date October
1896 and his exit date of August 1900. This would be the grades from his first
semester 1896 to 1897, we have the subject, the teacher, the grade that
Einstein received, and again one is the lowest grade and six is the highest
grade, then we have a column for notes or remarks. Their translations are
differential and integral calculus by Hurwitz, analytical geometry, descriptive
geometry, mechanics with exercises, determinants and projective geometry.
And it looks like he's done fairly well at his subjects although no 6's here.
So the grades aren't perfect. Over to the next semester we have differential
calculus and then physics by Weber or maybe Vee-ber if it's German.
Now Weber is a teacher of Einsteins worth mentioning because he made quite an
impact on Einstein during his time there. After Einstein initially failed the
entrance exam when he was only 16, it was Weber who invited Einstein to sit
in on his lectures while he was attending the school nearby.
But during Einstein's time as a student with him Weber seems to have turned on
Einstein and they ended with a very poor relationship. Einstein thought that
Weber's physics lectures were actually a bit old fashioned and out-of-date.
Around this time I believe that physicists were starting to accept
Maxwell's laws and incorporate that into their teaching, except for Weber who
didn't include Maxwell's laws at all. So Einstein didn't really have much respect
for Weber and did a lot of his own self learning to learn some of these things
like Maxwell's laws and other current work at the time. There was another
professor that Einstein also didn't get along with who we will encounter on the
next page but for now let's look at the rest of these subjects. We've got
mechanics, projective geometry again and then another familiar name, Minkowski
down here. This is geometry of numbers and it's interesting that Minkowski was
a former teacher of Einstein. You may have encountered the Minkowski's name when
reading about some of Einstein's work, maybe about general relativity because
Minkowski space-time and a few other things under this name are quite
important mathematical ideas there. So Minkowski actually later on in life
ended up helping with the mathematics of Einstein's theory but at this time
Minkowski was his teacher, although, and this is a bit of a trend, Einstein actually
skipped a lot of Minkowski's lectures like he did with Weber and others.
Einstein didn't think that he would derive much value from attending the
lectures and would rather just study on his own. We have some more classes from
Minkowski down here, we've got function theory
and potential theory. We'll go to the next semester and this is where things
get a little bit spicy 🌶. If we zoom in down here we will see the lowest grade
that we're going to see in this record and that is Intro to the Practice of
Physics. It would appear that this is a lab course and it was taught by
Professor John Pernet. Einstein very seldom showed up to this practical
course and so Pernet gave him the lowest possible grade of a 1 and he wrote this
note up here which says "March 1899: reprimand from the director on account
of lack of diligence in the physics practicum."
So really Einstein was penalized for not showing up enough to this class.
His other grades on this semester include a 6 from Weber in electrotechnical
laboratorium, a 5 from Weber in scientific work in physics lab and a
4 1/2 down here for something that translates as geographic location
but maybe it's got something to do with geometry I'm not sure. I should mention
that this Weber I've been talking about is not the same Weber that
electromagnetic flux is named after. That is Wilhelm Weber and this professor here
is a Heinrich Weber. On our last semester here we have partial
differential equations, AC systems and AC motors, systems of absolute electrical
measurements, scientific work in the physics lab, where he's got a 6 and a 5
so fairly high grades, intro to alternating current and applications of
analytical mechanics. It's not clear to me if the dashes indicate that he didn't
take the course or if the course just didn't have an exam because there are
many sources that say Minkowski was a former teacher of Einstein, but all I'm
seeing is a lot of dashes next to his name. This last page is his certificate
of departure and seems to be a summary of all of his courses and grades
indicating that he graduated with his diploma as a specialist teacher in the
mathematic direction, granted by the Swiss school council in July 28, 1900.
The presence of this 1 and
the fact that Einstein didn't show up to a lot of his classes may be a bit of a
surprise to you. It is said that Einstein could not easily bring himself
to study what did not interest him and most of his time he spent on his own in
joyful exploration of the wonders of science.
Einstein said in his autobiography that "one had to cram all this stuff into
one's mind for the examinations whether one liked it or not." This coercion had
such a deterring effect upon him that he says, "after I had passed the examination
I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me
for an entire year."
Now that is a sadly relatable quote I find. That the process
of being tested on subjects drains your interest in that subject so much that
you don't even want to look at it and it no longer brings you joy. I guess we're
lucky that Einstein didn't just quit physics there and did seem to re-find
his joy and his desire to work on difficult problems. The next paper I want
to show is a document from halfway through the degree and it shows the
classmates that Einstein had, it's a pretty small class, there's just five of them.
We've got Einstein here and we can see that halfway through his degree, if this
is the average column, that he was the highest average student so he was top of
his class. There is one notable classmate of Einstein's down here, Grossman, and he
is notable because he was a good friend of Einstein's and actually he is who
allowed Einstein to be able to skip so many classes because Einstein would
study from Grossman's notes before the exams. Einstein was very grateful to
Grossman and he said that he was a very diligent student who took very good
notes. It's kind of tragic for him that Einstein, the guy who was stealing his
notes, is the only one in the class who scored higher than him. After graduation
the other four students in the class, except for Einstein, went on to get
assistant positions in the university doing physics. Einstein, however, was not
able to get such a position but he did try because he wanted to continue his
career in physics. His tactic of copying Grossman's notes came back to bite him
because he had such a poor relationship with many of his teachers that none of
them wanted to take Einstein on as their assistant. Einstein considered it
to be Weber who was conspiring everyone against him
and Einstein even wrote letters out to many physicists across Europe to try and
get them to take him on but he had no success. His one salvation turned out to
be Grossman in the end, as Grossman's dad was able to get Einstein his job at the
Patent Office after a while. I even read that because of Einstein's mastery of
Maxwell's laws the patent office was happy to hire him but I guess he really
had Grossman to thank for a lot of that. Now there's one more document that I'd
like to take a look at and that is the grade history of Mileva Maric who was
Einstein's first wife and she actually met Einstein while studying at ETH.
She was in the same class at the start, she also was admitted in October 1896 and
was studying the same subjects although she spent a year in the middle studying
at the University of Heidelberg. This is the summary of her grades. You can see
they're actually pretty good we've got a five in something to do with
geometry. She's done differential and integral calculus, she has survived
Pernet's practical physics course and this is the one where Einstein got a 1
but she managed to get a 5. Sadly, however, she did not graduate because she
failed her final exam and then shortly after became pregnant with Einstein's
child. She did make one more attempt to pass the final exam but wasn't
successful and then moved away with Einstein to support him in his work.
I thought it would be worth making a note about her because she also was quite
important to Einstein's time at ETH and she is the one who he did a
lot of that self-study with. She was the one who he shared reading about
Maxwell's laws with and just exploring their joy of physics together.
So that's all I wanted to show you today. If there's any takeaway message it's that
Einstein did score pretty high grades as a student but that time was not without
struggle. Einstein knows what it's like to not get along with your professors
and to feel like the school system is beating your interest out of you. I would
say it's not a good idea to employ Einstein's strategy of not going to
lectures and just copying someone else's notes because although he passed it did
really come to hurt him when he tried to get a job later on. And I think that
still applies to university now. You want to be on good terms with people that are
in your field whether it's for reference letters or to just have good
relationships in academia. So thanks for watching and i'll see you next time.
This video was made possible by you, my viewers, through your support on Patreon.
Thank you. Special mention to today's patron cat of the day, Brandon 🐈