Happy Birthday, Einstein: A Theory of Relativity, a Six-Week Summer, and the Filipino Mind
It's Pi Day. It's Einstein's birthday. And one Fil-Am Aeronautical Engineering major's brush with relativity in a blistering UC Davis summer became a lesson in tiyaga — and a doorway to a bigger story about Filipinos in STEM.
I love quoting Einstein. Here are a few that carry extra weight today:
Happy Birthday, Albert. Relatively Speaking, You Almost Killed Me.
March 14 — 3.14 — is Pi Day, the annual celebration of the world's most famous irrational number. More importantly, it is the birthday of Albert Einstein, born on this date in 1879 in Ulm, Germany. The man who reimagined spacetime, gravity, and the speed of light itself — sharing his birthday with the number that helps describe the universe he decoded.
Happy Birthday, Einstein. From one of the millions you've tortured in lecture halls around the world.
I am not a physicist. But I survived one — barely.
At UC Davis, I was an Aeronautical Engineering major — the kid who wanted to design things that fly and fly them. Which meant Physics 8D (PHY 8D) wasn't optional. It was the final boss: the last course in the Physics for Engineering Majors series. And I didn't take it during the regular ten-week quarter. I took it during a blistering hot six-week summer session. The same material. Forty percent less time. One hundred percent more sweat — and not just from the Sacramento Valley heat.
Physics 8D is where Einstein lives. It picks up where classical mechanics (8A through 8C) leaves off and plunges into the territory he rewrote: special relativity — time dilation, length contraction, mass-energy equivalence (E = mc²); general relativity — spacetime curvature, gravity as geometry, the bending of light; and their applications — black holes, expanding universes, relativistic energy and momentum.
I remember sitting in lecture, staring at equations that described how time itself bends at the speed of light, and thinking: this man looked at the universe and saw something no one else could see.
And here I was, struggling to see how I'd pass the final.
I did pass. Barely.
But relatively, I was dead.
That's the most Pinoy thing Einstein ever said, even though he never set foot in the Philippines. Because that's what we do. We stay with problems. We endure. We find a way.
And that's where this story bends — relatively speaking — from one Filipino aero engineering student's brush with Einstein's universe into a much bigger question: What happens when an entire people, 12 million strong in America and over 100 million back home, are told — by the data, by the system, by the silence in the textbooks — that science isn't quite for them?
The Filipino Einstein You Should Know
When Diosdado "Dado" Banatao passed away on Christmas Day 2025 at the age of 79, the Filipino diaspora lost one of its greatest minds. Often called the "Bill Gates of the Philippines," Banatao was something far more foundational than that. He was the architect of the invisible infrastructure inside every personal computer you've ever touched.
Born in Iguig, Cagayan. Walked barefoot to elementary school. Graduated cum laude from Mapúa Institute of Technology. Master's from Stanford. Developed the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS chip, first system logic chipsets for IBM PCs, and one of the earliest graphics accelerator chips. Co-founded Mostron, Chips and Technologies, and S3 Graphics. Launched Tallwood Venture Capital with $300 million of his own money.
But Banatao's greatest legacy may not be silicon. Through the Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev) and the Banatao Family Filipino American Education Fund, he spent decades funding scholarships for Filipino and Filipino-American students pursuing STEM degrees. He built a computer center in his old grade school in Iguig. He believed, deeply and publicly, that Filipino talent was never the problem — only access and opportunity.
That is the most Filipino-American sentence ever spoken by a billionaire.
Before Banatao: The Scientists History Forgot
The Philippines has a deeper scientific tradition than most people — including most Filipinos — realize. Long before Banatao was drawing circuit diagrams, Filipino physicists were making contributions that echoed around the world.
National Scientist of the Philippines. Pioneered research into ultraviolet light and soft X-rays. Offered a teaching position at Howard University after American physicists recognized his work — chose instead to return home and teach at UP. During WWII, built reflecting telescopes for guerrilla fighters in Bulacan to aid reconnaissance against the Japanese. Co-founded the Bartol Research Foundation. Helped establish PAGASA.
Invented the two-way video telephone — decades before FaceTime or Zoom became verbs. Discovered the "Zara Effect" (electrical kinetic resistance). Developed an airplane engine that ran on alcohol fuel.
First person to discover a recurring area of open water in Antarctic sea ice — critical research in understanding climate change. Conducted groundbreaking studies on global warming at NASA.
These are not footnotes. These are chapters of a story that Filipino classrooms — and American ones — rarely tell.
The STEM Gap Nobody Talks About
Here is where the celebration gets complicated. For all the brilliance of individual Filipinos in STEM, the structural reality is sobering.
A University at Buffalo study found that Filipino students in the United States are nearly 60% less likely to choose a STEM major compared to other Asian American subgroups. Vietnamese and Thai students face similar disparities. The study directly challenged the "model minority" myth — the persistent and damaging assumption that all Asian Americans perform uniformly well in academics.
The researchers found that lumping all Asian Americans into one undifferentiated category obscures the real struggles of specific communities. Only 36% of Filipino parents in the study's dataset held college degrees, compared to over 70% of Chinese and South Asian parents. The pipeline isn't leaking equally for everyone.
Back in the Philippines, the picture is equally stark. In the 2019 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), Filipino students ranked 78th out of 79 countries in science and dead last — 79th — in mathematics. Recent national assessments showed that only about 35% of Grade 10 students achieved mastery in math.
Pi is infinite. The opportunities available to Filipino students in STEM should not feel finite.
What Pi Day Should Mean for Filipinos
Pi Day should not just be about eating pie and posting math memes. For Filipinos — here and abroad — March 14 should be a day to act.
Happy Pi Day. Happy Birthday, Einstein.
To every Filipino student staring at an equation right now, wondering if they belong in that classroom: You do. You always did.
Huwag kang titigil. Keep going.
Whether it's a barefoot kid in Cagayan who ends up revolutionizing Silicon Valley, a wartime physicist building telescopes for guerrillas, or a Fil-Am aero engineering major in Davis trying to survive relativity in July — the throughline is the same. We persist.
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🥧HBD Al!
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