![]() ![]() He would often scrawl a reply on paper, and Helen Dukas, his personal secretary, would either type the reply or just send off the written response as he wrote it. In her letter to Einstein she wrote, “I realize that you are a very busy man, but you are the only person we know of who could supply us with the answer.” After stating the problem for Einstein, she commented: “I think you will agree it is the hardest thing!”Īlthough Johanna would not have known it, Einstein had a consistent history of answering letters from children and others from the general public that he felt were genuine. Surely a star like Einstein would be far better to ask than the never-to-be-known-for-anything Westlake mathematics teacher. Johanna’s Hollywood surroundings probably contributed to her willingness to contact the biggest celebrity of all in the American scientific scene when she and her geometry classmates were stumped by a tricky homework problem. Some of her schoolmates, like Jane Fonda, would become movie stars. Her uncle was the famous producer and director Joseph Mankiewicz. Johanna was the daughter of Herman Mankiewicz, a writer who collaborated with Orson Welles on the movie Citizen Kane. The request for aid had arrived in the mail from Johanna Mankiewicz, a high school sophomore at the Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles. In early May 1952, 73-year-old Albert Einstein took a break from his three-decade pursuit of a unified field theory to provide a 14-year-old some help with a geometry problem. Credit: Ulli Stelzer, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives Albert Einstein speaks to the press about his unified field theory in 1953, months after he answered a letter from an eager high school student.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |