“Everybody knows Albert Einstein flunked math.” This was offered and repeated constantly when I was a child, to reassure underachievers that our time would someday come. A Google search found more...

“Everybody knows Albert Einstein flunked math.” This was offered and repeated constantly when I was a child, to reassure underachievers that our time would someday come. A Google search found more than 500,000 references to it, and it even made it into “Ripley’s Believe it or Not!” newspaper column.

Except it isn’t true. When showed the column in 1935, he laughed. “I never failed in mathematics,” he replied, correctly. “Before I was 15 I had mastered differential and integral calculus.” Einstein’s mathematical genius was one of his many intelligences—and was pronounced at an early age (Isaacson, 2007).