Max Born (December 11, 1882 in Breslau - January 5, 1970 in Göttingen) was a mathematician and physicist. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics and was one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

Early life and education

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Born was one of two children of Jewish parents Gustav Born, an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarete Kauffmann, from a Silesian family of industrialists. He had a sister called Käthe, and a half-brother called Wolfgang from his father's second marriage with Bertha Lipstein. His mother died when Max Born was 4 years old. Initially educated at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, Born went on to study at the University of Breslau followed by Heidelberg University and the University of Zurich. During this period, he came into contact with many prominent scientists and mathematicians including Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, Runge, Schwarzschild, and Voigt.

In 1909 he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Göttingen where he worked until 1912 when he moved to work at the University of Chicago.

He married Hedwig, née Ehrenberg, in 1913; the marriage would have three children including G. V. R. Born. His granddaughter is the British born Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John.

Career

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In 1919 after a period in the German army he became a professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and then professor at Göttingen, 1921. During this period, he formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation of quantum mechanics, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954, some three decades later.

In 1933 he emigrated from Germany. (He had strong and public pacifist opinions; moreover, while he was a Lutheran, he was classified as Jewish by the Nazi racial laws, and was experiencing antisemitism. He would later become a Quaker.) He took up a position (Stokes Lecturer) at the University of Cambridge. From 1936 to 1953 he was Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He became a British subject and a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1939.

Albert Einstein was a friend of Born, and it was in a letter to him in 1926 that Einstein made his famous remark regarding quantum mechanics, often paraphrased as "God does not play dice with the universe."

Max and Hedwig Born retired to Bad Pyrmont (10 km south of Hamelin (Hameln)) in Germany.

Published works

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• Mein Leben: Die Erinnerungen des Nobelpreisträgers (Munich: Nymphenburger, 1975). Born's published memoirs.
• The Restless Universe - a popularization for students
• Einstein's Theory of Relativity 1924. (The 1962 Dover edition, page 348 lists a table documenting the observed and calculated values for the precession of the perihelion of Mercury, Venus, and Earth.)
• Dynamical Theory of Crystal Lattices(with Kun Huang),
• Optik
• Moderne Physik
• Atomic Physics
• Mechanics of the Atom, Frederic Ungar Publ. Co., 1960
• Principles of Optics (with Emil Wolf),
• Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance and
• Zur Quantummechanik.
• Natural Philosophy of Cause and Chance, Born solves Kant's puzzle of the Ding an Sich, the thing in itself.
• Published papers (as listed on the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS))

See also: Max Born, Hedwig Born, Albert Einstein. The Born-Einstein Letters.

Awards

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• 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics
• the Stokes Medal
• 1950 Hughes Medal

See also

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• Born rigidity

External links

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• Max Born information from Nobel Winners site
• Nobel Laureate biography
• Papers of Professor Max Born (1882-1970) Held at the Edinburgh University Library, Special Collections Division
• Recollections of Max Born, by Emil Wolf, in Astrophysics and Space Science, Volume 227, Numbers 1-2. (Biographical tribute)
• Annotated bibliography for Max Born from the Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

1882 births | 1970 deaths | Fellows of the Royal Society | Nobel Prize in Physics winners | Refugees | British physicists

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