London, Sept. 15 (Reuters): Albert Einstein was the outstanding genius of the 20th century, but he was also an ordinary man who had many affairs during his two marriages.

This other side of the German-born scientist who gave the world its most famous equation, E=MC?, and who was declared the man of the century by Time magazine, is explained in a new exhibition to mark Einstein Year. Revered by leading scientists and the ordinary public alike for his intellectual powers and sharp wit, and loved by children across the world for his gently avuncular air and unruly mop of white hair, Einstein was also a keen ladies’ man.

“He was a passionate and very complex man, fascinatingly full of contradictions,” said Hanoch Gutfreund, Einstein specialist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem which helped mount the show at the Jewish Museum in London's Camden Town.

“He loved both of his wives but he went actively seeking the affairs, and women also sought him out,” he said at a preview of the exhibition yesterday.

And while he cherished the mountains of letters he got from children during his years at Princeton University in the US, where he fled in 1933 aged 54, he had little contact with his own three children by his first wife Mileva Maric.

There is no evidence he ever saw his daughter Lieserl who was born in Hungary in 1902 before the couple married and while Einstein was working as a technical expert at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. Indeed her existence was not even known until relatively recently ? discovered in love letters from Einstein to Maric before they married in 1903 ? and all trace of her disappears after that year.

His marriage to Maric ? an intellectual foil for Einstein ? was against the wishes of his domineering mother as she was Serbian and not Jewish. “It was a very passionate love affair at the outset. But it soured quite quickly and their divorce was very bitter,” Gutfreund said.

Well before the marriage ended, Einstein had several affairs and had begun a relationship with his cousin Elsa who he promptly married after divorcing Maric in 1919 ? the year his theory of relativity was proved and he shot to stardom.