Two Stories...

There are two stories people tell about Albert Einstein about mistakes - one is true and the other apocryphal.... Guess which is which.

Story #1 - Einstein received a letter from a 23 year-old grad student pointing out errors in Einstein's paper on a unified theory of Distant Parallelism and offering corrections. The errors, according to Einstein, were the student's and signed his polite but stern reply: "Yours respectfully, A. Einstein."

But just two weeks later Einstein sent a second reply admitting that "your transformation equation is correct, mine wrong."

Story #2 - Einstein began to write out the nines times table in front of a class at Princeton University - 1 x 9 = 9, 2 x 9 = 18,... 9 x 9 = 81, and 10 x 9 = 91. At that point students began to laugh out loud and ridiculed Einstein.

Waiting for the class to quiet, Einstein said, "Despite the fact that I analyzed nine problems correctly, no one congratulated me. But when I made one mistake, everyone started laughing. This means that even if a person is successful, society will notice his slightest mistake. So don’t let criticism destroy your dreams. The only person who never makes a mistake is someone who does nothing."

Now which story is true?

And does it matter?