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.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
For more updated biographical information, see: Born, Max, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate. Taylor & Francis, London, 1978.
Max Born died on January 5, 1970.
