Max Born

Max Born (December 11, 1882 in Breslau – January 5, 1970 in Göttingen) was a mathematician and physicist. He won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Max Born Early life and education.

Born was one of two children of Jewish parents Gustav Born, an anatomist and embryologist, and Margarete Kauffmann, from a Silesian family of industrialists. He had a sister called Käthe, and a half-brother called Wolfgang from his father's second marriage with Bertha Lipstein. His mother died when Max Born was 4 years old. 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 study for his Ph.D.[1] and Habilitation [2] at the University of Göttingen, he came into contact with many prominent scientists and mathematicians including Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, Runge, Schwarzschild, and Voigt. In 1908-1909 he studied at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.When Born arrived in Göttingen in 1904, Klein, Hilbert, and Minkowski[3] were the high priests of mathematics and were known as the “mandarins.” Very quickly after his arrival, Born formed close ties to the latter two men. From the first class he took with Hilbert, Hilbert identified Born as having exceptional abilities and selected him as the lecture scribe, whose function was to write up the class notes[4] for the students’ mathematics reading room at the University of Göttingen. Being class scribe put Born into regular, invaluable contact with Hilbert, during which time Hilbert’s intellectual largess fell upon Born’s fertile mind. Hilbert became Born’s mentor and Hilbert eventually selected him to be the first to hold the unpaid, semi-official position of Hilbert’s assistant. Born’s introduction to Minkowski came through Born’s stepmother, Bertha, as she knew Minkowski from dancing classes in Königsberg. The introduction netted Born invitations to the Minkowski household for Sunday dinners. In addition, while performing his duties as scribe and assistant, Born often saw Minkowski at Hilbert’s house. Born’s outstanding work on elasticity - a subject near and dear to Klein - became the core of his magna cum laude Ph.D. thesis, in spite of some of Born’s irrationalities in dealing with Klein.[5]He married Hedwig, née Ehrenberg, who was of Jewish descent (although a practising Christian), in 1913; the marriage would have three children including G. V. R. Born. His granddaughter is the British-born Australian singer and actress Olivia Newton-John.

Max Born Career

From 1915 to 1919, except for a period in the German army, Born was extraordinarius professor of theoretical physics at the University of Berlin, where he formed a life-long friendship with Albert Einstein. In 1919, he became ordinarius professor on the science faculty at the University of Frankfurt am Main. While there, the University of Göttingen was looking for a replacement for Peter Debye, and the Philosophy Faculty had Born at the top of their list. In negotiating for the position with the education ministry, Born arranged for another chair at Göttingen and for his long-time friend and colleague James Franck to fill it.[6] In 1921, Born became ordinarius professor of theoretical physics and Director of the new Institute of Theoretical Physics at Göttingen.[7] While there, 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.For the 12 years Born and Franck were at Göttingen, 1921 - 1933, Born had a collaborator with shared views on basic scientific concepts - a distinct advantage for teaching and his research on the developing quantum theory. The approach of close collaboration between theoretical physicists and experimental physicists was also shared by Born at Göttingen and Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, who was ordinarius professor of theoretical physics and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics - also a prime mover in the development of quantum theory. Born and Sommerfeld not only shared their approach in using experimental physics to test and advance their theories, Sommerfeld, in 1922 when he was in the United States lecturing at the University of Wisconsin, sent his student Werner Heisenberg to be Born’s assistant. Heisenberg again returned to Göttingen in 1923 and completed his Habilitation under Born in 1924 - the year before Heisenberg and Born published their first papers on matrix mechanics.[8] [9]In 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg[10] formulated the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. On July 9, Heisenberg gave Born a paper to review and submit for publication.[11] In the paper, Heisenberg formulated quantum theory avoiding the concrete but unobservable representations of electron orbits by using parameters such as transition probabilities for quantum jumps, which necessitated using two indexes corresponding to the initial and final states.[12] When Born read the paper, he recognized the formulation as one which could be transcribed and extended to the systematic language of matrices, which he had learned from his study under David Hilbert at Göttingen [13] - Hilbert space, is a fundamental mathematical tool in the matrix formulation of quantum theory. Born, with the assistance of his student Pascual Jordan, began immediately to make the transcription and extension, and they submitted their results for publication.[14] A follow-on paper was submitted for publication before the end of the year by all three authors.[15] [16] Based on this, one could say the Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Heisenberg in 1932 should have been jointly awarded to Born. [17]Those who received their Ph.D. degrees under Born at Göttingen included Max Delbrück, Walter Elsasser, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Maria Göppert-Mayer, Lothar Wolfgang Nordheim, Robert Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf.[18] Born’s assistants at the University of Göttingen’s Institute for Theoretical Physics included Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Gerhard Herzberg, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner.[19] [20] [21] Born not only recognized talent to work with him, but he let his “superstars stretch past him.” [22] His Ph.D. student Delbrück, and six of his assistants (Fermi, Heisenberg, Göppert-Mayer, Herzberg, Pauli, Wigner) went on to win Nobel Prizes.In a letter to Born in 1926, Einstein made his famous remark regarding quantum mechanics, often paraphrased as "God does not play dice with the universe."In 1933 he emigrated from Germany. (He had strong and public pacifist opinions; moreover, while he was a Lutheran, he was classified as Jewish by the Nazi racial laws, and was experiencing anti-Semitism.) He 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. [23]Born had a dislike for nuclear weapons research, but he still acknowledged “it might be the only way out.”[24] Much of the theoretical power behind the development of the first atomic bomb was due to many of those surrounding him at Göttingen and working on atomic physics and quantum mechanics: three of his Ph.D. students (Maria Göppert-Mayer, Oppenheimer and Weisskopf), there of his assistants (Fermi, Teller, and Wigner), the Director of the Second Institute for Experimental Physics (James Franck), and David Hilbert’s assistant (John von Neumann).[25]Max and Hedwig Born retired to Bad Pyrmont (10 km south of Hamelin (Hameln)) in Germany, in 1954[26].Born was one of the 11 signatories to the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.Born is buried in Göttingen, Germany, in the same cemetery as Walther Nernst, Wilhelm Weber, Max von Laue, Max Planck, and David Hilbert.