Max
Born
(1882 - 1970)
Max Born (December 11, 1882 in Breslau - January 5, 1970 in Göttingen) was a German mathematician and physicist. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics and was one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.
Family
Born was the only child of German Jews, Gustav Born and Margarete Kauffmann, and was the father of G. V. R. Born, and the maternal grandfather of British born Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John.
Education and early work
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.
Career
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 left Germany to escape anti-Semitism and 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 (10km south of Hamelin (Hameln)) in Germany.
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