
Myth: Einstein failed math at school
This is a surprisingly old error which everyone seems to believe. Its origins seem to be a 1935 article in the Ripley’s Believe it or not magazine in which the myth first appears in print under the heading “Greatest living mathematician failed in mathematics.” Many failing students probably take heart in the myth thinking that there may be hope for them if Einstein could flunk math and still become a genius, but unfortunately for them, Einstein showed genius from a very young age – including in the field of mathematics. When he was shown the article from the magazine, Einstein laughed and said: “I never failed in mathematics. Before I was fifteen I had mastered differential and integral calculus.”
Interesting Fact: In 1905, during his spare time, Einstein produced four papers that upended physics. The first showed that light could be conceived as particles as well as waves. The second proved the existence of atoms and molecules. The third, the special theory of relativity, said that there was no such thing as absolute time or space. And the fourth noted an equivalence between energy and mass described by the most famous equation in all of physics, E=mc^2.