Born, Max

PHYSICIST, MATHEMATICIAN (GERMANY)
BORN 11 Dec 1882, Breslau (now: Wroclaw) - DIED 5 Jan 1970, Göttingen, Niedersachsen
GRAVE LOCATION Göttingen, Niedersachsen: Stadtfriedhof, Kasseler Landstrasse (Abteilung 7 (neben dem Familienbegräbnis Jhering/Ehrenberg))

Max Born was the son of the anatomist Gustav Born (1851-1900). He studied at the Universities of Breslau and Göttingen, where Felix Klein, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowsku were teaching at the time. He won the Philosophy Faculty Prize for his thesis on "Stability of Elastica in a Plane and Space". From 1905 onwards he studied special relativity together with Minkoswki. In 1913 he married Hedwig Ehrenberg (1891-1972), the daughter of the lawyer Victor Ehrenberg (1851-1921). They had three children. His daighter Irene was the mother of the singer Olivia Newton-John.

During the First World War he worked as a radio operator. In 1918 he met Max Haber and this meeting led to what became known as the Born-Haber cycle. In 1921 he returned to Göttingen. In 1925 he formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics with Werner Heisenberg. After the nazis came to power in 1933 he was removed from his professorship because he was Jewish. He moved to Cambridge where he worked at St John's College and wrote his books "The Restless Universe" and "Atomic Physics". In 1936 he became professor of Natural Philosophy in Edinburgh. In 1939 he became a British citizen. He worked in Edinburgh until 1952. After his retirement he moved to Bad Pyrmont in 1954. In that same year he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He continued to do research and published new editions of his books. He died in 1970 in Göttingen.

Related persons
• was teacher of Heisenberg, Werner
• was pupil of Hilbert, David
• worked for Minkowski, Hermann

Images

The grave of Max Born at the Stadtfriedhof, Göttingen.
Picture by Androom (25 Aug 2017)

 

Sources
Max Born - Wikipedia


Börne, Ludwig

Published: 29 Feb 2020
Last update: 29 Feb 2020