Israel’s Hebrew University unveiled yesterday a collection of 110 manuscript pages written by Albert Einstein, many of which it said have never been displayed before.
They include hand-written mathematical notes, most from 1944 to 1948, and also an appendix which the school said was thought lost, to a paper on unified field theory that the German-born physicist presented to the Prussian Academy of Science in 1930.
Einstein, who developed the theory of relativity, a pillar of modern science, tried unsuccessfully for decades to prove another concept – that electromagnetism and gravity were different manifestations of a single fundamental field.
Hebrew University said it received the papers as a donation to its 80,000-item Albert Einstein Archives from a foundation in Chicago after they were purchased from a private collector in North Carolina.
Einstein, who settled in the United States after renouncing his German citizenship when Adolf Hitler came to power, bequeathed his scientific and personal writings to Hebrew University. Einstein, who won the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics, died in New Jersey in 1955.