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 🐈
r/asmr
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