Who says that being smart hurts your reproductive success?
Albert Einstein had half a dozen girlfriends and told his wife they showered him with "unwanted" affection, according to letters released on Monday that shed light on his extramarital affairs.
The wild-haired Jewish-German scientist, renowned for his theory of relativity, spent little time at home. He lectured in Europe and in the United States, where he died in 1955 at age 76. But Einstein wrote hundreds of letters to his family.
Previously released letters suggested his marriage in 1903 to his first wife Mileva Maric, mother of his two sons, was miserable. They divorced in 1919, and he soon married his cousin, Elsa. He cheated on her with his secretary, Betty Neumann.
In the new volume of letters released on Monday by Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Einstein described about six women with whom he spent time and from whom he received gifts while being married to Elsa.
Actually I don't think that Einstein is probably indicative of anything other than a tendency among smart people to have utterly perverse personal lives.
I swear, Baby, I am not like that...
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I think this is yet another case of a story's precedence over actual statistics, which is a known thought process error among all humans. It is described in the book "Don't Believe Everything You Think: The 6 Basic Mistakes We Make in Thinking" by Thomas Kida (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1591024080?v=glance)
By itself the story is actually worthless unless you are researching Einstein and trying to find out how these women may have affected his research, etc. Anybody else is looking for something to generalize: yeah baby, you know what they say about guys with big crania!
Despite the fact (as the Koray said above) that this fact probably does not indicate any sort of trend, it is still an interesting tidbit to learn about Einstein. And for some reason it is strangely reassuring.