Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [c.1950]
One page, 215 x 139mm, on verso of a printed ‘memorandum’ form. Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

Mathematical calculations towards unified field theory. The manuscript comprises 18 lines of algebraic notation, including (line 5) the note in German ‘Drittes Gl[ied] ersetzt durch …’ (Third term replaced by…).

Einstein devoted the last thirty years of his life to the quest to combine general relativity and Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism into a single physical and mathematical framework which would account for all of the then-known fundamental forces of nature – a ‘unified field theory’. Although his early attempts in the 1920s focused on ‘distant parallelism’, he later concentrated on an approach treating both the metric tensor and the affine connection as fundamental fields, often introducing an element of asymmetry (in variance to the theory of general relativity). Einstein often complained of the heavy mathematical burden imposed by this approach, as demonstrated in the present manuscript.