Adding Einstein to my Autism Hall of Fame

Unless you were a reader of my (now inactive) WordPress blog, you may not be aware of the existence of my informal Autism Hall of Fame.

I began that project around 2012, and have added candidates sporadically (and sometimes indirectly, with a wink and a nod) since that time. Although I am quite serious in thinking that each person mentioned (nearly all of them males) was (or is) autistic, some of my entries are a bit tongue-in-cheek, or meant to be provocative.

When my dear departed friend Steve Silberman was writing his prize-winning book on autism, NeuroTribes, I spent countless hours over a period of several years, talking with him about its content, his life and times, and the general state of advocacy within the autistic community. Although he lived in San Francisco, we met many times in person (we both traveled a lot), and we also communicated via email, Facebook, and Twitter.

In all of that time, I don’t remember mentioning to him my Autism Hall of Fame, although he probably read my blog. Perhaps he took some inspiration from my writing, or (more likely) he had already drafted the first chapter of his book, devoted to an historical character, Henry Cavendish (1731-1810). Steve used Cavendish to illustrate the stereotypic behavior common to autistic persons, as well as to make the point that autism is nothing new.

The 23 July 2026 issue of the London Review of Books (LRB) contains an essay by Ray Monk on “Einstein’s Miracle Year” — which has several statements that caught my eye.

Within the autistic community, Einstein has long been held up as one of our heroes — an example of how autistic people can be capable of achieving great things. He certainly provided a case of “thinking outside the box” (many autistic people, when encountering this phrase, jokingly say, “What box?”). Monk mentions Einstein’s 1905 paper that introduced the special theory of relativity, indirectly making the point that Einstein was in no way boxed in.

One striking thing about ‘On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies’ is that it contains no citations at all to previously published work.

I had been under the impression that it was universally accepted that Einstein was autistic, but a few years ago, I encountered a doubter. In 2015, Mark St. Germain was writing a play (Dancing Lessons) that had an autistic character, and I was serving as an advisor, to help him portray the young man accurately.

I read his script, and Mark accepted all of my many suggested changes except one (and he had a good reason for that). After the play had premiered, we had lunch, and he told me about his next project — Relativity, a play about Einstein.

Ah! my face lit up — another autistic person! No, Mark told me, he had studied Einstein carefully and he did not believe he was autistic. The play was focused on Einstein’s personal life, not his professional accomplishments, and his family life was messed up. All the more reason to think he’s autistic, I thought to myself, but I dropped the subject. One of my other candidates, Ted Williams, provides an illustration of an autistic person having difficulty with interpersonal relationships.1

Einstein was aware of his limitations. Monk reports that

When the first president of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, died in 1952, David Ben-Gurion is reported to have said: ‘There is only one man whom we should ask to become the president of the State of Israel. He is the greatest Jew on Earth. Maybe the greatest human being on Earth: Einstein.’ Einstein demurred. ‘My relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond,’ he said, but having devoted his life to the understanding of objective matters, ‘I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.’

An even more convincing suggestion that Einstein was autistic comes from an earlier account in the essay. He was born in March of 1879.

Einstein’s childhood was spent in Munich, where his parents moved a year after he was born, and where in 1881 his sister, Maria (always called Maja), was born. … He was slow in learning to talk, and, Maja recalls, even after he had mastered speech, he would, before he uttered a sentence, repeat it softly to himself before saying it out loud. He later told a psychologist that, even in adulthood, he rarely thought in words: ‘A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards.’

That last sentence describes exactly how I think. I struggle to find the words to express what I am thinking. That is a great handicap in real-time conversations, and much easier to deal with by writing.

Another aspect of Monk’s essay that I found striking was Einstein’s affinity with Spinoza. {Aside: I have in mind a future OLLI course on Spinoza and his influence on the Enlightenment philosophers, especially the French philosophes, and probably David Hume. I’ve not seen any evidence that Hume acknowledged that. It’s possible that the influence was indirect, though he was a voracious reader, versant in Latin, and spent time in Paris during a period when Spinoza was all the rage.}

Baruch (de) Spinoza is most noted for his heretical views that there are no miracles, only the laws of nature; and that God and Nature are the same thing.

Einstein declared himself to be a believer in Spinoza’s God, and famously said “God does not play dice” — although in that case he was not doubting miracles, rather the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics. (Ironically, Einstein’s work under discussion here had created the field of quantum physics.)

‘The most beautiful thing we can experience,’ he writes in ‘What I Believe’, from 1930, ‘is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.’ In ‘Religion and Science’, written around the same time, he speaks of the ‘cosmic religious sense’, which he characterises as a feeling of ‘the vanity of human desires and aims, and the nobility and marvellous order which are revealed in nature and in the world of thought’.

Einstein once remarked: ‘Subtle is the Lord, but He is not malicious.’ For someone with no religious belief in the usual sense, Einstein invoked the name of God with surprising frequency. Public Writings includes a piece published in the New York Times in which he is asked directly: ‘Do you believe in God?’ ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God,’ he replied, ‘who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’

In these latter quotations, Einstein sounds to me more like a Deist than a Spinozian Pantheist. I see parallels in the beliefs of Spinoza and the Native Americans in this part of the world. I am familiar with at least two different indigenous words that name “The Creator” and are sometimes translated as “The Great Spirit” — my friend Joe Bruchac told me he prefers “The Great Mystery” because the Creator is beyond all human comprehension, having no form or substance or location or gender.

Einstein’s words suggest not just a gender but intentionality — a somewhat degraded form of Spinoza’s (or Native American) beliefs.

I’ll close with just three notes on Monk’s essay.

I’ve written elsewhere about my (and Steve Silberman’s) observation that a passion for economic and social justice seems to be a nearly universal trait among autistic people. Monk writes:

… when, after the rise of Hitler, he settled in the US, he involved himself in particular with the struggle for justice and equality for Black people. ‘The more I feel an American,’ he wrote in ‘A Message to My Adopted Country’ (1946) with regard to racial prejudice, ‘the more this situation pains me. I can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out.’

One outcome related to this desire for equal treatment is advocacy for an end to the inherent injustice of violence. I can speak to this via my lifelong practices of pacifism and vegetarianism. Einstein was not a lifelong vegetarian, but he did adopt a strict vegetarian diet during the final year or two of his life. For most of his life, he ate meat, though he often expressed moral support for vegetarianism. Monk writes (at some length) about Einstein’s pacifism:

Einstein’s most abiding political passion, however, was his lifelong opposition to nationalism, militarism and war.

And finally, Monk closes his essay by (presumabley unknowingly) revealing two aspects of autism: the comfort of routine and the difficulty of interacting with other people.

‘I want to go to France,’ [one of his students] said. ‘I would like to find myself in new surroundings.’

‘I never look for that,’ Einstein replied. ‘I like Paris, but I don’t want to go there or anywhere. I should not like to learn a new language. I don’t like new food or new clothes. I’m not much with people, and I’m not a family man. I want my peace. I want to know how God created the world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.’