Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Autograph manuscript of scientific calculations, n.d. [March 1950 - early April 1951]
1½ pages, 280 x 216mm, dated (likely in the hand of Helen Dukas) in pencil at upper right and at lower left (partial watermark of Whitings mutual bond rag content). Provenance: Sotheby’s, 30 May 1979, lot 49 (part).

Einstein deep in mathematical contemplation. The manuscript comprises approximately 31 lines of mathematical workings.

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.