Einstein’s Letter to a Girl Who Wanted to Be a Scientist

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗
0 0 Edit this post
Einstein’s Advice to a Girl Who Wanted to Be a Scientist

In September 1946 a schoolgirl in South Africa named Tyfanny wrote to Albert Einstein and, almost as an afterthought, confessed that she was a girl. She had told him she wanted to become a scientist, and now she worried he would take her less seriously. Einstein’s answer was two sentences long. He did not mind that she was a girl, he wrote, and what really mattered was that she should not mind either.

That small exchange, preserved in the collection Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children, says a great deal about how talent gets lost long before anyone reaches a laboratory. Below is the story of the letters, the book they come from, and what researchers now know about why so many girls quietly decide that science is not for them.

What Tyfanny wrote and how Einstein replied

Tyfanny was not a one-time correspondent. She and Einstein traded several letters, and he reportedly told her she reminded him of his own granddaughter. In one of those letters, dated 19 September 1946, she circled back to something she had forgotten to mention: she was a girl, she had long regretted it, and she had more or less made her peace with it. She explained that she had no patience for dresses and dances, that she loved horses, and that before science took hold of her imagination she had dreamed of riding as a jockey. She ended with a plea that still lands hard today: “I hope you will not think any the less of me for being a girl!”

Einstein replied within a few weeks, somewhere between late September and October 1946. His note was brief and kind:

“I do not mind that you are a girl, but the main thing is that you yourself do not mind.”

He added a final line that brushed the whole worry aside: “There is no reason for it.”

The reply works because it moves the problem to the right place. Einstein does not lecture Tyfanny about equality or promise her a smooth path. He simply refuses to treat her sex as relevant to her ambitions, and then hands the question back to her. The real obstacle, he suggests, would be if she began to believe the doubt herself.

Einstein’s Advice to a Girl Who Wanted to Be a Scientist

The book behind the letters

Dear Professor Einstein gathers letters that children from around the world sent to Einstein, together with many of his replies. It was edited by Alice Calaprice, who spent many years working on Einstein’s papers at Princeton University Press, with help from the historian Robert Schulmann. The introduction was written by Evelyn Einstein, the adopted daughter of Einstein’s son Hans Albert, and so his granddaughter.

The children write about everything: homework, God, whether scientists are allowed to have messy hair, and what the universe is made of. Einstein, by then the most famous scientist alive, answered more of them than you might expect. His replies are usually short, warm and free of condescension. He treats young readers as people capable of real thought, which is one reason the collection is still passed between teachers, parents and science lovers.

The Tyfanny exchange became widely known online after the writer Maria Popova featured it in 2012 on her site Brain Pickings, now called The Marginalian. Popova framed it as a tiny but telling answer to a large question: how do you encourage more girls to become scientists in the first place?

Why a girl in 1946 felt she had to apologise

Tyfanny’s fear was not imagined. In the 1940s women were still widely barred from senior academic posts, many universities limited their access to science degrees, and the few women working in physics were often unpaid or uncredited. Marie Curie had won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, but it would be 1963 before another woman, Maria Goeppert Mayer, did the same. After that came another long gap: Donna Strickland in 2018, Andrea Ghez in 2020 and Anne L’Huillier in 2023.

Against that background, a schoolgirl’s apology makes sense. She had absorbed the message that science belonged to men and that a girl who wanted it was asking for an exception. What makes her letter so moving is that she wrote anyway.

Where things stand today

Much has changed, but not everything. According to UNESCO figures cited on Wikipedia, women made up about 30 percent of researchers worldwide in 2015 and around a third by 2018. The share varies a great deal by field. Women are well represented in life sciences and medicine in many countries, but remain a clear minority in physics, engineering and computer science.

Researchers point to a mix of reasons: stereotypes about who is “naturally” brilliant, fewer visible role models, teachers and parents who unknowingly steer children, workplaces that make it hard to combine research with family life, and outright harassment and bias. None of these is about ability. Girls and boys perform at broadly similar levels in school mathematics and science in most countries; the gap opens later, in choices and confidence.

What Einstein’s reply teaches parents and teachers

Einstein’s two sentences contain a surprisingly practical lesson. He did three things that anyone can copy when a child doubts that she belongs in science.

  • He took her seriously. He answered her letters at all, and he answered them more than once. Attention from someone respected is itself a form of encouragement.
  • He refused to make her sex the topic. He did not praise her for being an unusual girl, which can quietly confirm that girls in science are oddities. He treated it as irrelevant.
  • He pointed to her own belief. By saying the main thing was that she should not mind, he showed her that the most important vote was hers.

In everyday life that can look like praising effort and curiosity rather than “being clever”, giving girls hands-on projects with tools and code, introducing them to living women scientists rather than only historical ones, and noticing when a child starts saying “I’m just not a maths person”. That phrase is often the sound of a door closing.

Common myths about girls and science

“Girls are simply less interested”

Interest is shaped, not fixed. Young children of both sexes are fascinated by animals, space and how things work. Differences in stated interest tend to grow with age, as children learn which hobbies and careers are expected of them. Tyfanny’s own letter shows this pressure at work: she felt she had to distance herself from what “girls usually like” in order to justify her dream.

“The best scientists are lone geniuses”

Einstein himself is often used as the symbol of the lone genius, yet his work grew out of constant conversation with friends, teachers and colleagues. Modern science is even more collaborative. The myth matters because children who do not see themselves as a lone genius type may decide they do not belong.

“Things were fixed long ago”

Progress since 1946 is real, but the numbers above show that women are still under-represented in many fields, especially at senior levels. Encouragement like Einstein’s is still needed.

Why such a short letter still matters

It is easy to imagine that Tyfanny’s question was small. She was a child, and Einstein was busy with physics, politics and his campaign against nuclear weapons. Yet the most important encouragement often comes in exactly this form: a few honest words from an adult who sees potential and says so plainly.

If you know a girl who loves taking things apart, staring at stars or asking why, Einstein’s reply is worth passing on in your own words. Her being a girl does not matter to the work. What matters is that she does not let it matter to her.

If you want to read more, the full collection is worth finding through a library or bookshop. It is a gentle reminder that the most famous scientist of the twentieth century made time for children’s questions, and that he answered them as if they were real questions, because they were.

Sources: Letters from Dear Professor Einstein: Albert Einstein’s Letters to and from Children, edited by Alice Calaprice; story first highlighted by Maria Popova, The Marginalian (Brain Pickings); Wikipedia: Evelyn Einstein; Wikipedia: Women in STEM fields.

Related:

Related reading

Labels:

Facebook ↗WhatsApp ↗

COMMENTS

BLOGGER