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Mileva Maric

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Celebrity's Relative

The Resume

    (December 19, 1875-August 4, 1948)
    Born in Titel (then Austro-Hungarian Empire, now Serbia)
    Serbian physicist
    First wife of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein
    Attended the Zurich Polytechnic School where she met Einstein (she was his only female classmate)
    Married Einstein in January of 1903
    Divorced Einstein on February 14, 1919

Why she might be annoying:

    She failed her Zurich diploma examination twice.
    Her love letters with Einstein were made public.
    She was four years older than Einstein when she married him.
    Her husband cheated on her and eventually left her for his own cousin.
    She refused to grant him a divorce until he agreed to have a clause inserted into their divorce settlement ceding any Nobel Prize money, should he ever win one, to her. (But then all divorcing couples do that, don't they?)
    Her husband, appropriately, would send her gifts of cacti specimen after their divorce.
    Her son had a nervous breakdown and was committed.
    She later suffered a nervous breakdown herself and annoyed the hell out of her live-in nurses, who actually disconnected her buzzer because she was running them ragged.
    Many scientists and historians were angered by a PBS documentary suggesting she had a role in helping Einstein develop his Theory of Relativity.
    Feminists have tried to make her into another Madame Lavoisier, but the evidence that she contributed to her husband's scientific pursuits just isn't there.

Why she might not be annoying:

    She is honored with a memorial bust at the University of Novi Sad.
    She was friends with Madame Curie.
    She is unfairly portrayed as overbearing and shrewish in the docudrama, 'Einstein's Big Idea.'
    By all accounts, in the last years of their marriage, her husband acted like a dick to her.
    She either lost her first child to scarlet fever, gave her up for adoption, or both.
    Her husband's repeated financial failures during their marriage prevented her from seeking her degree at a later point.
    Her husband kept his promise to her when he won the Nobel Prize, although before that point he offered little financial support (she had to teach math classes to make ends meet for their two sons).
    She was knocked up by Einstein, ruining her chance at an already improbable career as a physicist.
    She never attempted to take credit for her husband's work, in public or in private.
    She was forced to sell two of the houses she bought with the Nobel Prize money to pay for her son's mental health expenses.
    She proves the old saying that behind every great man is a woman rolling her eyes.

Credit: BoyWiththeGreenHair


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 3 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 11 Votes: 90.91% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 17 Votes: 5.88% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 3 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 4 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 13 Votes: 46.15% Annoying