Mileva Einstein

Mileva's qualifications leave no doubt that she was a brilliant physicist and scientist, often with higher grades than Albert. And even so, she failed to pass the final exams in her career.

"Too intellectual". "An old witch." These are some of the comments that Albert Einstein's family dedicated to the scientist's first wife, the Serbian Mileva Einstein.

Before their divorce in 1916, they had both been students at the Zurich Polytechnic Institute, one of the few universities in Europe that admitted women at the time. There they shared their love for science. Letters between them also reveal that, around 1900, when they were still unmarried, Mileva became pregnant. There are no records of the whereabouts of the couple's first child, but it is believed that she died after contracting scarlet fever, an infectious disease.

Several biographies indicate that the student period was the beginning of many years of collaboration, for which Mileva received little credit, and that raising her children with Albert took her away from the first echelon of science.

The 43 letters between them, that have been preserved, mention "our works" and "our theory of relative motion", "our point of view" or "our articles".

"During school holidays, which were often far apart, they exchanged several letters in which Albert constantly referred to her collaboration," says Pauline Gagnon, senior physicist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), to BBC 4's Today programme.

There are still many reports that the two came to work together. "Even his son, Hans Albert, remembers watching them work together day and night at the kitchen table," says Gagnon.

This was in 1905, when Albert published his most important work: four articles in the journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) that changed the understanding of the laws of physics forever, including his theory of relativity.

Upon divorce, the two agreed that if Albert won the Nobel Prize, Mileva would keep the prize money.

He received the prize in the field of Physics in 1921, when he had been separated from his first wife for two years and had remarried.

When Albert made her will and left the prize money to her children, she is believed to have threatened to reveal her participation in the works. The scientist advised her to remain silent.

"Erasing brilliant women like Mileva from the history of science doesn't help with the work of demonstrating that we women are as capable as men."