This past Friday marked the 150th birthday of Mileva Marić, the intellectual and first wife of famed mathematician and physicist Albert Einstein. In science history, Mileva Marić-Einstein occupies a complex and increasingly significant place, not only as the first wife of Albert Einstein but as a trained physicist and mathematician whose life illuminates the structural barriers faced by women in science at the turn of the twentieth century.

Marić was born in 1875 to a Serbian family in the town of Titel in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which lies in the present-day province of Vojvodina, Serbia.  At a time when women were largely excluded from higher scientific education, she gained admission to the Zurich Polytechnic (ETH Zurich), one of Europe’s leading technical institutions. This alone positioned her as an outlier: she was among the very first women in Europe to receive advanced training in theoretical physics, studying alongside future luminaries, including Albert Einstein. In fact, she was the only woman in the same........

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