Max Born (German: [ˈmaks ˈbɔʁn]; 11 December 1882 – 5 January 1970) was a German–British theoretical physicist who played a key role in developing quantum mechanics. He also contributed to solid-state physics and optics. He supervised the work of many important physicists during the 1920s and 1930s. He shared the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics with Walther Bothe for his research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction.

Born entered the University of Göttingen in 1904, where he met three famous mathematicians: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis about the stability of elastic wires and tapes, earning a prize from the university’s Philosophy Faculty. In 1905, he studied special relativity with Minkowski and later wrote his habilitation thesis on the Thomson model of the atom. In 1918, he met Fritz Haber in Berlin, which led to discussions about how ionic compounds form when metals react with halogens, a process now called the Born–Haber cycle.

During World War I, Born was first assigned as a radio operator, but his expertise led to his being moved to research sound ranging. In 1921, he returned to Göttingen and helped arrange a position for his friend James Franck. Under Born’s leadership, Göttingen became a major center for physics. In 1925, Born and Werner Heisenberg created the matrix mechanics representation of quantum mechanics. The next year, he developed the standard interpretation of the probability density function for ψ*ψ in the Schrödinger equation, which earned him the Nobel Prize in 1954.

Beyond his own research, Born influenced many scientists. Max Delbrück, Siegfried Flügge, Friedrich Hund, Pascual Jordan, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Lothar Nordheim, Robert Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf all earned their Ph.D. degrees under Born at Göttingen. His assistants included Enrico Fermi, Werner Heisenberg, Gerhard Herzberg, Friedrich Hund, Wolfgang Pauli, Léon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner.

In January 1933, when the Nazi Party gained power in Germany, Born, who was born into a Jewish family, was removed from his professorship at the University of Göttingen. He moved to the United Kingdom, where he worked at St John’s College, Cambridge, and wrote books such as The Restless Universe and Atomic Physics, which became a standard textbook. In 1936, he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where he continued his research with assistants E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs. He became a British citizen on 31 August 1939, the day before World War II began in Europe. He lived in Edinburgh until 1952, then retired to Bad Pyrmont, West Germany, and died in a hospital in Göttingen on 5 January 1970.

Education

Max Born was born on 11 December 1882 in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), which was then part of the Kingdom of Prussia. He was born into a Jewish family. His father, Gustav Jacob Born, was a scientist who studied the human body and how it develops. His father was a professor at the University of Breslau. His mother, Margarethe Gretchen Kauffmann, came from a family of industrialists in Silesia. Margarethe died when Max was 4 years old. Max had a sister named Käthe, born in 1884, and a half-brother, Wolfgang, from his father’s second marriage to Bertha Lipstein. Wolfgang later became a professor of art history at the City College of New York.

Max began his education at the König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium in Breslau. In 1901, he entered the University of Breslau. At that time, students in Germany could move easily between universities. He studied at the University of Heidelberg in 1902 and the University of Zurich in 1903. Friends at Breslau, Otto Toeplitz and Ernst Hellinger, told him about the University of Göttingen, and he moved there in April 1904. At Göttingen, he met three famous mathematicians: Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and Hermann Minkowski. He formed close relationships with Hilbert and Minkowski. Hilbert noticed Max’s talent early and chose him to take notes for his classes, which gave Max regular access to Hilbert. Hilbert later became Max’s mentor and made him the first person to hold an unpaid assistant position. Max met Minkowski through his stepmother, Bertha, who knew Minkowski from dancing classes. This connection led to invitations to Minkowski’s home for Sunday dinners. As a scribe and assistant, Max often saw Minkowski at Hilbert’s house.

Max’s relationship with Felix Klein was more difficult. He attended a seminar on elasticity with Klein, Carl Runge, and Ludwig Prandtl. Though not interested in the topic, Max had to present a paper. He used Hilbert’s math methods to study the stability of a curved wire. Klein was impressed and invited Max to write a thesis on the stability of elastic structures, a topic Klein cared about. Max declined, as he preferred theoretical math over applied math. Klein was upset by this.

Felix Klein had significant influence over academic careers, so Max felt he needed to submit a thesis to make amends. Since Klein refused to supervise him, Max chose Carl Runge as his advisor. Woldemar Voigt and Karl Schwarzschild were also examiners. Starting with his earlier paper, Max developed equations for stability conditions. He built an experiment to test his predictions. On 13 June 1906, the university announced Max had won a prestigious prize. A month later, he passed his oral exam and earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics with high honors.

After graduation, Max was required to serve in the German Army, which he had delayed while studying. He was assigned to the 2nd Guards Dragoons "Empress Alexandra of Russia" in Berlin. His service was short, as he was discharged early in 1907 due to an asthma attack. He then traveled to England, where he joined Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and studied physics for six months under J. J. Thomson, George Searle, and Joseph Larmor. After returning to Germany, the army reinducted him, and he served briefly with the 1st (Silesian) Life Cuirassiers "Great Elector" before being discharged again due to health issues. He returned to Breslau, working under Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim to pursue a physics qualification. A laboratory accident involving a flooded room led Lummer to tell Max he would never become a physicist.

In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper on special relativity. Max was interested in the topic and began researching it. He was surprised to learn Hermann Minkowski was also studying relativity. Minkowski asked Max to return to Göttingen to complete his qualification there. Otto Toeplitz helped Max improve his math skills to work with Minkowski’s four-dimensional space matrices. Max and Minkowski collaborated well, but Minkowski died suddenly in 1909 from appendicitis. Students spoke on his behalf at his funeral.

A few weeks later, Max tried to present their work at a Göttingen meeting. He was challenged by Felix Klein and Max Abraham, who opposed relativity, and had to stop his talk. However, David Hilbert and Carl Runge supported Max’s work and encouraged him to present it again. This time, he was not interrupted, and Woldemar Voigt agreed to sponsor his qualification. Max later published his findings in an article titled Die Theorie des starren Elektrons in der Kinematik des Relativitätsprinzips (The Theory of the Rigid Electron in the Kinematics of the Principle of Relativity), introducing the concept of "Born rigidity." On 23 October, he gave a lecture on the Thomson model of the atom.

Career and research

Max Born began his career as a young teacher at the University of Göttingen, where he worked without a salary as a Privatdozent. In Göttingen, he lived in a boarding house at Dahlmannstrasse 17, called El BoKaReBo. The name came from the first letters of the last names of the people who lived there: "El" for Ella Philipson (a medical student), "Bo" for Born and Hans Bolza (a physics student), "Ka" for Theodore von Kármán (a Privatdozent), and "Re" for Albrecht Renner (another medical student). A visitor to the house was Paul Peter Ewald, a student of Arnold Sommerfeld, who worked with David Hilbert in Göttingen. Richard Courant, a mathematician and Privatdozent, referred to these people as the "in group."

In 1912, Born married Hedwig (Hedi) Ehrenberg, the daughter of a law professor at Leipzig University and a friend of Carl Runge’s daughter. Hedi had Jewish heritage on her father’s side, but her father and sister had become Lutheran after marriage, though he never practiced the religion. He refused to convert, and their wedding in 1913 was a garden ceremony. In 1914, he was baptized as a Lutheran by the same pastor who performed the wedding. Born believed religion was unimportant, but he chose baptism partly to please his wife and partly to fit into German society. The couple had three children: two daughters, Irene (1914) and Margarethe (Gritli, 1915), and a son, Gustav (1921). Through marriage, Born was related to jurist Victor Ehrenberg (his father-in-law), Rudolf von Jhering (his wife’s maternal grandfather), and philosopher Hans Ehrenberg. He was also a great uncle of British comedian Ben Elton.

By the end of 1913, Born had written 27 papers, including work on relativity and the structure of crystal lattices (three with Theodore von Kármán), which became a book. In 1914, Max Planck informed him that a new professor position in theoretical physics had been created at the University of Berlin. The position was offered to Max von Laue, but Laue declined. Born accepted the job. World War I began soon after, and in 1915, he joined the army’s signals unit. Later that year, he worked with the Army’s artillery research group under Rudolf Ladenburg, who studied sound ranging technology. In Berlin, he became close friends with Albert Einstein, who often visited his home. After the war ended in 1918, Planck arranged for Born to leave the army. A meeting with Fritz Haber that month led to discussions about how ionic compounds form, now known as the Born–Haber cycle.

Before Born moved to Berlin, Laue changed his mind and wanted the Berlin position instead. They agreed to swap jobs. In 1919, Born became a professor and director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Frankfurt am Main. Later, the University of Göttingen asked him to replace Peter Debye as director of its Physical Institute. Albert Einstein encouraged him to accept, saying, “Theoretical physics will thrive wherever you go; there is no other Born in Germany today.” Born also helped arrange a position in experimental physics at Göttingen for his friend James Franck.

In 1919, Elisabeth Bormann joined Born’s institute as an assistant. She created the first atomic beams and, with Born, measured how far atoms travel in gases and the size of molecules.

From 1921 to 1933, Born and Franck worked together at Göttingen. Their shared scientific views helped both teaching and research. Born collaborated with experimental physicists, much like Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich, who also worked with experimentalists to test and develop quantum theory. In 1922, Sommerfeld sent his student Werner Heisenberg to work with Born in the United States. Heisenberg returned to Göttingen in 1923, completed his qualification to teach at the university under Born in 1924, and became a Privatdozent.

In 1919 and 1920, Born gave speeches in support of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which faced many criticisms. He earned money from these speeches to help with expenses during a time of high inflation. His speeches were published in a book in 1920, with Einstein reviewing the proofs before publication. A third edition came out in 1922, and an English version in 1924. In the book, Born described light speed as depending on the curvature of space, saying, “Light moves much faster in some directions than its usual speed, and other objects can also move much faster.”

In 1925, Born and Heisenberg developed matrix mechanics, a way to describe quantum mechanics using matrices. On July 9, Heisenberg gave Born a paper titled Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen (Quantum-Theoretical Re-interpretation of Kinematic and Mechanical Relations) to review. In the paper, Heisenberg described quantum theory using transition probabilities instead of unobservable electron orbits. Born recognized that this approach could be expressed using matrices, which he had studied earlier. At the time, physicists rarely used matrices, which were considered part of pure mathematics. Born and his assistant Pascual Jordan quickly expanded Heisenberg’s work, publishing their findings 60 days after Heisenberg’s paper. A follow-up paper by all three authors was published by the end of the year. Their work showed that the product of matrices for position (q) and momentum (p) does not equal zero because matrix multiplication is not commutative. This formulation, entirely created by Born, established that only diagonal elements of the matrix are non-zero. Born believed his paper with Jordan included “the most important principles of quantum mechanics, including its extension to electrodynamics.” The paper provided a solid mathematical foundation for Heisenberg’s approach.

Later life

In January 1933, the Nazi Party gained power in Germany. In May of that year, Born became one of six Jewish professors at the University of Göttingen who were suspended from their jobs but still received their salaries. Another professor, Franck, had already left his position. Over twelve years, these professors had helped make Göttingen one of the world's leading places for physics research. Born began searching for a new job, writing to Maria Goeppert Mayer at Johns Hopkins University and Rudi Ladenburg at Princeton University. He accepted a position at St John's College, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he wrote a popular science book titled The Restless Universe and a textbook called Atomic Physics, which became widely used and went through seven editions. His family settled into life in England, and his daughters Irene and Gritli became engaged to a Welsh man named Brinley (Bryn) Newton-John and an Englishman named Maurice Pryce, respectively. Born's granddaughter, Olivia Newton-John, was the daughter of Irene.

Born's position at Cambridge was temporary, and his job at Göttingen ended in May 1935. He then accepted an offer from C. V. Raman to move to Bangalore in 1935. Born considered staying there permanently, but the Indian Institute of Science did not create a new position for him. In November 1935, the German government took away Born's citizenship, making him stateless. A few weeks later, the University of Göttingen canceled his doctorate. Born considered an offer from Pyotr Kapitsa in Moscow and began learning Russian from the wife of Rudolf Peierls, a woman named Genia. However, Charles Galton Darwin asked Born if he would take over as Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Born accepted and started his new job in October 1936.

At Edinburgh, Born worked to teach mathematical physics. He had three assistants: two from Germany, E. Walter Kellermann and Klaus Fuchs, and one from Scotland, Robert Schlapp. Together, they studied the strange behavior of electrons. In 1937, Born became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 1939, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society. During 1939, he helped as many of his remaining friends and relatives in Germany as possible leave the country, including his sister Käthe, his in-laws Kurt and Marga, and the daughters of his friend Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg. Hedi, his wife, managed a domestic bureau that helped young Jewish women find jobs. On August 31, 1939, one day before World War II began in Europe, Born received his certificate of naturalization as a British citizen.

Born stayed at Edinburgh until he reached the retirement age of 70 in 1952. He then moved to Bad Pyrmont, West Germany, in 1954. In October, he learned he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. His fellow scientists had nominated him many times over the years. Franck and Fermi had nominated him in 1947 and 1948 for his work on crystal lattices, and he had also been nominated for his research on solid-state physics, quantum mechanics, and other topics. In 1954, he received the Nobel Prize "for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction," a discovery he made alone. In his Nobel lecture, he discussed the philosophical meaning of his work.

After retiring, Born continued his scientific work and updated his books. In 1955, he signed the Russell–Einstein Manifesto. He died at the age of 87 in a hospital in Göttingen on January 5, 1970, and was buried in the Stadtfriedhof cemetery there, alongside notable scientists such as Walther Nernst, Wilhelm Weber, Max von Laue, Otto Hahn, Max Planck, and David Hilbert.

Global policy

He was one of the people who signed an agreement to gather a group for writing a world constitution. Because of this, the first World Constituent Assembly was held in history to write and approve a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

Family

Max Born's wife, Hedwig (Hedi) Martha Ehrenberg (1891–1972), was the daughter of lawyer Victor Ehrenberg and Elise von Jhering, who was the daughter of lawyer Rudolf von Jhering. Max Born was survived by his wife, Hedi, and their children: Irene, Gritli, and Gustav. Singer and actress Olivia Newton-John was the daughter of Irene (1914–2003). Gustav was the father of musician and academic Georgina Born and actor Max Born, who appeared in Fellini Satyricon. These individuals are also Max's grandchildren. His great-grandchildren include songwriter Brett Goldsmith, singer Tottie Goldsmith, racing car driver Emerson Newton-John, and singer Chloe Rose Lattanzi. Max Born helped his nephew, architect Otto Königsberger (1908–1999), get a commission in the Mysore State.

Commemoration

• 1972: The Max Born Medal and Prize was established by the German Physical Society and the Institute of Physics. It is given every year.
• 1982: A ceremony was held at the University of Göttingen to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Max Born and James Franck, who were Institute Directors from 1921 to 1933.
• 1991: The Max-Born-Institut für Nichtlineare Optik und Kurzzeitspektroskopie [de] was created. This institute is named in honor of Max Born.
• 11 December 2017: Google displayed a doodle designed by Kati Szilagyi to honor the 135th birthday anniversary of Max Born.

General references

• Bernstein, Jeremy (2005). "Max Born and the Quantum Theory." American Journal of Physics. 73 (11): 999–1008. Bibcode: 2005AmJPh..73..999B. doi: 10.1119/1.2060717. Reprinted as Chapter 7 in Bernstein, Jeremy (2014). A Chorus of Bells and Other Scientific Inquiries.
• Born, M.; Heisenberg, W.; Jordan, P. (1925). "Zur Quantenmechanik II." Zeitschrift für Physik. 35 (557–615): 557. Bibcode: 1926ZPhy…35..557B. doi: 10.1007/BF01379806. S2CID 186237037.
• Born, M.; Jordan, P. (1925). "Zur Quantenmechanik" (PDF). Zeitschrift für Physik. 34 (1): 858–888. Bibcode: 1925ZPhy…34..858B. doi: 10.1007/BF01328531. S2CID 186114542. Archived from the original (PDF) on 4 October 2013.
• Born, M. (1926). "Zur Quantenmechanik der Stoßvorgänge." Zeitschrift für Physik. 37 (12): 863–867. Bibcode: 1926ZPhy…37..863B. doi: 10.1007/BF01397477. S2CID 119896026.
• Born, Max (1969). Physics in My Generation. New York: Springer-Verlag. OCLC 53116.
• Born, M.; Born, M. E. H. & Einstein, A. (1971). The Born–Einstein Letters: Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Max and Hedwig Born from 1916 to 1955, with commentaries by Max Born. I. Born, trans. London, UK: Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8027-0326-2.
• Born, G. V. R. (May 2002). "The Wide-Ranging Family History of Max Born." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. 56 (2): 219–262. doi: 10.1098/rsnr.2002.0180. JSTOR 3557669. S2CID 72026412.
• Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike (2005). The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born. New York: Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-7382-0693-6. OCLC 56534998. Also published in Germany: Max Born – Baumeister der Quantenwelt. Eine Biographie. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, 2005, ISBN 3-8274-1640-X.
• Heisenberg, W. (1925). "Über quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen." Zeitschrift für Physik. 33 (1): 879–893. Bibcode: 1925ZPhy…33..879H. doi: 10.1007/BF01328377. S2CID 186238950.
• Jammer, Max (1966). The Conceptual Development of Quantum Mechanics. New York: McGraw–Hill. OCLC 534562.
• Jungnickel, Christa; McCormmach, Russell (1986). Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, Volume 2: The Now Mighty Theoretical Physics, 1870 to 1925. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-41585-7. OCLC 489992471.
• Kemmer, N.; Schlapp, R. (1971). "Max Born 1882–1970." Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 17: 17–52. doi: 10.1098/rsbm.1971.0002. S2CID 73330505.
• Pais, Abraham (1991). Niels Bohr's Times, In Physics, Philosophy and Polity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-852049-8.
• Segrè, Emilio (1980). From X-Rays to Quarks: Modern Physicists and Their Discoveries. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company. ISBN 978-0-7167-1147-6. OCLC 5946636.