Albert Einstein hated wearing socks.

  • Albert Einstein at his Princeton home
Albert Einstein at his Princeton home
Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd/ Alamy Stock Photo
Author Sarah Anne Lloyd

January 14, 2026

Love it?

Albert Einstein’s outside-the-box thinking didn’t just lead to groundbreaking scientific thought — it also gave him his fair share of quirks. Among his most notorious eccentricities was his outright rejection of socks. Look closely at full-body portraits of the scientist and you’ll notice bare ankles above his wingtip shoes and a general preference for sandals. 

Einstein’s secretary noted that he didn’t even put on socks for a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. As he once wrote to his future wife Elsa, “Even on the most solemn occasions, I got away without wearing socks and hid the lack of civilisation in high boots.”

The explanation Einstein gave to both biographer Antonina Vallentin and photographer Philippe Halsman for his lack of socks was that he really didn’t like the holes his big toes made in them. But his letters reveal a deeper love for barefootedness. While spending eight weeks by the Baltic Sea in 1918, Einstein wrote to a colleague that he wanted to stay barefoot back home in Berlin. (According to biographer Albert Fölsing, it wasn’t until Einstein moved to the United States in 1933 that he started going barefoot full time.)

Overall, Einstein’s missing socks were part of a broader philosophy, one that scoffed at standard etiquette, didn’t put much stock in appearance, and valued simple things. When a photographer at Princeton asked about the socks, Einstein joked, “It would be an awful situation if the containers were of better quality than the meat.” And he told family friend Peter Bucky, “It is my feeling that the less that I can get along with in daily life, such as automobiles and socks, the freer I am from these drudgeries.” Bucky also noted that Einstein would read Emily Post’s Etiquette and laugh.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Albert Einstein was a staunch pacifist.

Throughout his life, Albert Einstein condemned war, militarism, and nationalism, even when doing so was unpopular. After World War I, he became an outspoken pacifist, criticizing the League of Nations for not prioritizing an end to warfare. He encouraged civil disobedience and called on those eligible for military service to refuse, regardless of a war’s cause. His views shifted when the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, but he still advocated for less destructive intervention.

In 1939, Einstein signed a letter warning Franklin D. Roosevelt about the destructive potential of uranium, which led to the Manhattan Project, America’s effort to be the first to develop atomic weapons, ultimately resulting in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The devastation weighed heavily on Einstein, who called the letter “one great mistake in my life.” The scientist spent the rest of his life advocating for nuclear disarmament. 

x