On June 8, 1905, Mileva Marić wrote to a friend describing the work she and her husband Albert Einstein had been doing together — papers that would become, by year's end, the special theory of relativity, the photoelectric effect, and Brownian motion.

Mileva Marić was the only woman in her physics cohort at ETH Zurich. She earned grades equivalent to Einstein's. Their letters from their student years overflow with joint scientific discussion, shared problems, shared solutions.

The 1905 papers were published under Einstein's name alone. The marriage deteriorated. In 1919, as part of their divorce settlement, Einstein promised her the Nobel Prize money — before he had won it, confident that he eventually would.

The extent of Marić's contribution to the 1905 papers remains contested. What is documented: she was his intellectual partner, she solved mathematical problems he struggled with, and her name appears on no published work from their joint years despite her training and capability.

She raised their sons largely alone after the divorce, one of whom developed schizophrenia. She died in Zurich in 1948, largely unknown. The letters between her and Einstein that document their collaboration were not made publicly available until 1987.