Max Born

Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function. He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he took a job at St John’s College, Cambridge, and wrote a popular science book.

About Max Born in brief

Max Born (11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 1930s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially in the statistical interpretation of the wave function. He emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he took a job at St John’s College, Cambridge, and wrote a popular science book, The Restless Universe, which soon became a standard textbook. He died in hospital in Göttingen, Germany, on 5 January 70. He was one of two children born to Gustav Born, an anatomist and embryologist, and his wife Margarethe née Kauffmann, from a Silesian family of industrialists. Max had a sister, Käthe, who was born in 1884, and a half-brother, Wolfgang, from his father’s second marriage, to Bertha Lipstein. He later became a naturalised British subject on 31 August 1939, one day before World War II broke out in Europe. His influence extended far beyond his own research. His assistants included Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Gerhard Herzberg, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner. He wrote his Ph.

D. thesis on the subject of \”Stability of Elastica in a Plane and Space\”, winning the University’s Philosophy Faculty Prize. In 1905, he began researching special relativity with Minkowski, and subsequently wrote his habilitationsis on the Thomson model of the atom. In 1925, he formulated the now-standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation, for which he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1954. In 1936, he became the Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where, working with German-born assistants E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, he continued his research into physics. He took part in the creation of the theory of relativity in the 1950s and 1960s. He had a long-standing friendship with mathematician David Hilbert, who helped him with his work on special relativity. He went on to become one of the world’s foremost centres for physics, and was a member of the influential group of mathematicians that included Felix Klein, David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. He retired to Bad Pyrmont, in West Germany, in 1970, and died from cancer in a hospital there. He is buried in the nearby town of Wurzburg, in the German state of Baden-Würzburg. His son, Michael, is a well-known physicist and author of several books on quantum physics.

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