Max Born
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 ?*? 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. |
