MAX BORN
Max Born was born in Breslau on the 11th December, 1882, to
Professor Gustav Born, anatomist and embryologist, and his wife Margarete,
née Kauffmann, who was a member of a Silesian family of
industrialists.
Max attended the König Wilhelm's Gymnasium in Breslau and continued his
studies at the Universities of Breslau (where the well-known mathematician
Rosanes introduced him to matrix calculus), Heidelberg, Zurich (here he
was deeply impressed by Hurwitz's lectures on higher analysis), and
Göttingen.
In the latter seat of learning he read mathematics chiefly, sitting under
Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, and Runge, but also studied astronomy under
Schwarzschild, and physics under Voigt. He was awarded the Prize of the
Philosophical Faculty of the University
of Göttingen for his work on the stability of elastic wires and tapes
in 1906, and graduated at this university a year later on the basis of
this work.
Born next went to Cambridge for a short time, to study under Larmor and J.
J. Thomson. Back in Breslau during the years 1908-1909, he worked with the
physicists Lummer and Pringsheim, and also studied the theory of
relativity. On the strength of one of his papers, Minkowski invited his
collaboration at Göttingen but soon after his return there, in the winter
of 1909, Minkowski died. He had then the task of sifting Minkowski's
literary works in the field of physics and of publishing some uncompleted
papers. Soon he became an academic lecturer at Göttingen in recognition
of his work on the relativistic electron. He accepted Michelson's
invitation to lecture on relativity in Chicago (1912) and while there he
did some experiments with the Michelson grating spectrograph.
An appointment as professor (extraordinarius) to assist Max
Planck at Berlin University came to Born in 1915 but he had to join
the German Armed Forces. In a scientific office of the army he worked on
the theory of sound ranging. He found time also to study the theory of
crystals, and published his first book, Dynamik der Kristallgitter
(Dynamics of Crystal Lattices), which summarized a series of
investigations he had started at Göttingen.
At the conclusion of the First World War, in 1919, Born was appointed
Professor at the University of
Frankfurt-on-Main, where a laboratory was put at his disposal. His
assistant was Otto
Stern, and the first of the latter's well-known experiments, which
later were rewarded with a Nobel Prize, originated there.
Max Born went to Göttingen as Professor in 1921, at the same time as James
Franck, and he remained there for twelve years, interrupted only by a
trip to America in 1925. During these years the Professor's most important
works were created; first a modernized version of his book on crystals,
and numerous investigations by him and his pupils on crystal lattices,
followed by a series of studies on the quantum theory. Among his
collaborators at this time were many physicists, later to become
well-known, such as Pauli,
Heisenberg,
Jordan, Fermi,
Dirac,
Hund, Hylleraas, Weisskopf, Oppenheimer, Joseph Mayer and Maria
Goeppert-Mayer. During the years 1925 and 1926 he published, with
Heisenberg and Jordan, investigations on the principles of quantum
mechanics (matrix mechanics) and soon after this, his own studies on the
statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
As were so many other German scientists, he was forced to emigrate in 1933
and was invited to Cambridge, where he taught for three years as Stokes
Lecturer. His main sphere of work during this period was in the field of
nonlinear electrodynamics, which he developed in collaboration with Infeld.
During the winter of 1935-1936 Born spent six months in Bangalore at the
Indian Institute of Science, where he worked with Sir C. V. Raman and his
pupils. In 1936 he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy in
Edinburgh, where he worked until his retirement in 1953. He is now living
at the small spa town, Bad Pyrmont.
Max Born has been awarded fellowships of many academies - Göttingen,
Moscow, Berlin, Bangalore, Bucharest, Edinburgh, London, Lima, Dublin,
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Washington, and Boston, and he has received
honorary doctorates from Bristol, Bordeaux, Oxford, Freiburg/Breisgau,
Edinburgh, Oslo, Brussels Universities, Humboldt University Berlin, and
Technical University Stuttgart. He holds the Stokes Medal of Cambridge,
the Max Planck Medaille der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft (i.e. of
the German Physical Society); the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society,
London, the Hugo Grotius Medal for International Law, and was also awarded
the MacDougall-Brisbane Prize and the Gunning-Victoria Jubilee Prize of
the Royal Society, Edinburgh. In 1953 he was made honorary citizen of the
town of Göttingen and a year later was granted the Nobel Prize for
Physics. He was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the Order of
Merit of the German Federal Republic in 1959.
The year 1913 saw his marriage to Hedwig, née Ehrenberg, and there
are three children of the marriage.
Max Born died in 1970
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