Physicist, born in Wroc?aw, SW Poland (formerly Breslau, Prussia). He became professor of theoretical physics at Göttingen (192133), lecturer at Cambridge (19336), and professor of natural philosophy at Edinburgh (193653). In 1954 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with Walther Bothe for work in the field of quantum physics.
Max Born|
Max Born |
|
| Born |
December 11, 1882 Breslau, Germany |
|---|---|
| Died |
January 5, 1970 Göttingen, Germany |
| Nationality | German - British |
| Field | Physicist |
| Institution |
University of Frankfurt-on-Main University of Göttingen University of Edinburgh |
| Doctoral Advisor | Carl Runge |
| Doctoral Students |
Victor Frederick Weisskopf Robert Oppenheimer Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim Herbert S. Green |
| Known for | Foundations of quantum mechanics |
| Notable Prizes | Nobel Prize for Physics (1954) |
Max Born (December 11, 1882 in Breslau – January 5, 1970 in Göttingen) was a mathematician and physicist.
Early life and education
Born was one of two children of Jewish parents Gustav Born, an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarete Kauffmann, from a Silesian family of industrialists. 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.
When Born arrived in Göttingen in 1904, Klein, Hilbert, and Minkowski were the high priests of mathematics and were known as the “mandarins.” Very quickly after his arrival, Born formed close ties to the latter two men. From the first class he took with Hilbert, Hilbert identified Born as having exceptional abilities and selected him as the lecture scribe, whose function was to write up the class notes for the students’ mathematics reading room at the University of Göttingen. Being class scribe put Born into regular, invaluable contact with Hilbert, during which time Hilbert’s intellectual largess fell upon Born’s fertile mind. Born’s outstanding work on elasticity - a subject near and dear to Klein - became the core of his magna cum laude Ph.D.
Career
From 1915 to 1919, except for a period in the German army, Born was extraordinarius professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin, where he formed a life-long friendship with Albert Einstein. While there, the University of Göttingen was looking for a replacement for Peter Debye, and the Philosophy Faculty had Born at the top of their list. In negotiating for the position with the education ministry, Born arranged for another chair at Göttingen and for his long-time friend and colleague James Franck to fill it. In 1921, Born became ordinarius professor of theoretical physics and Director of the new Institute of Theoretical Physics at Göttingen.
For the 12 years Born and Franck were at Göttingen, 1921 - 1933, Born had a collaborator with shared views on basic scientific concepts - a distinct advantage for teaching and his research on the developing quantum theory. The approach of close collaboration between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists was also shared by Born at Göttingen and Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, who was ordinarius professor of theoretical physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics - also a prime mover in the development of quantum theory. Born and Sommerfeld not only shared their approach in using experimental physics to test and advance their theories, Sommerfeld, in 1922 when he was in the United States lecturing at the University of Wisconsin, sent his student Werner Heisenberg to be Born’s assistant. Heisenberg again returned to Göttingen in 1923 and completed his Habilitation under Born in 1924 - the year before Heisenberg and Born published their first papers on matrix mechanics.
In 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. On July 9, Heisenberg gave Born a paper to review and submit for publication. When Born read the paper, he recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices, which he had learned from his study under David Hilbert at Göttingen - Hilbert space, is a fundamental mathematical tool in the matrix formulation of quantum theory. Based on this, one could say the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Heisenberg in 1932 should have been jointly awarded to Born.
In a letter to Born in 1926, 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, in 1954.
Born was one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
Born is buried in Göttingen, Germany, in the same cemetery as Walther Nernst, Wilhelm Weber, Max von Laue, Max Planck, and David Hilbert.
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