Editor:
In your article, "Scholar urges schools focus on child's `greatness'" (UBC Reports, Feb. 6), you state that Albert Einstein was dyslexic. While this makes a nice story and seems to be quite widely believed, I doubt that it is anything more than a myth. The biography, Subtle is the Lord, the Science and Life of Albert Einstein, by Abraham Pais (Oxford University Press, 1982) states that although his family had initial apprehensions that he might be backward because of the unusually long time before he began to talk, he was speaking in whole sentences by some point between age two and three years. When Einstein was seven his mother wrote "Yesterday Albert received his grades, he was again number one, his report card was brilliant." Pais states, "the widespread belief that he was a poor student is unfounded."
Ian Affleck
Physics and Astronomy
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