A handwritten letter by Albert Einstein that contains his famous E=mc2 equation has sold at auction for more than $1.2m, about three times more than it was expected to get, a Boston-based auction house said on Friday. Archivists at the Einstein Papers Project at the California Institute of Technology and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem say there are only three other known examples of Einstein writing the world-changing equation in his own hand. RR Auction, which sold the most recent letter, says this fourth example is the only one in a private collection and only became public recently. “It’s an important letter from both a holographic and a physics point of view,” Bobby Livingston, the executive vice-president at RR Auction said, calling the equation the most famous in the world. “Your question can be answered from the E=mc2 formula, without any erudition,” Einstein wrote in the letter written on Princeton University letterhead, according to a translation provided by RR Auction.

Source: The Guardian May 21, 2021 20:03 UTC