Max Born was born in Breslau on
the 11th December, 1882, to Professor Gustav Born, anatomist and
embryologist, and his wife Margarete, née Kauffmann,
who was a member of a Silesian family of industrialists.
Max attended the König Wilhelm's Gymnasium in Breslau and
continued his studies at the Universities of Breslau (where the
well-known mathematician Rosanes introduced him to matrix
calculus), Heidelberg, Zurich (here he was deeply impressed by
Hurwitz's lectures on higher analysis), and Göttingen. In
the latter seat of learning he read mathematics chiefly, sitting
under Klein, Hilbert, Minkowski, and Runge, but also studied
astronomy under Schwarzschild, and physics under Voigt. He was
awarded the Prize of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of
Göttingen for his work on the stability of elastic wires
and tapes in 1906, and graduated at this university a year later
on the basis of this work.
Born next went to Cambridge for a short time, to study under
Larmor and J.J.
Thomson. Back in Breslau during the years 1908-1909, he
worked with the physicists Lummer and Pringsheim, and also
studied the theory of relativity. On the strength of one of his
papers, Minkowski invited his collaboration at Göttingen but
soon after his return there, in the winter of 1909, Minkowski
died. He had then the task of sifting Minkowski's literary works
in the field of physics and of publishing some uncompleted
papers. Soon he became an academic lecturer at Göttingen in
recognition of his work on the relativistic electron. He accepted
Michelson's invitation to lecture on relativity in Chicago (1912)
and while there he did some experiments with the Michelson
grating spectrograph.
An appointment as professor (extraordinarius) to assist Max Planck at Berlin University came to
Born in 1915 but he had to join the German Armed Forces. In a
scientific office of the army he worked on the theory of sound
ranging. He found time also to study the theory of crystals, and
published his first book, Dynamik der Kristallgitter
(Dynamics of Crystal Lattices), which summarized a series of
investigations he had started at Göttingen.
At the conclusion of the First World War, in 1919, Born was
appointed Professor at the University of Frankfurt-on-Main, where a
laboratory was put at his disposal. His assistant was Otto Stern, and the first of the
latter's well-known experiments, which later were rewarded with a
Nobel Prize, originated there.
Max Born went to Göttingen as Professor in 1921, at the same
time as James Franck, and he
remained there for twelve years, interrupted only by a trip to
America in 1925. During these years the Professor's most
important works were created; first a modernized version of his
book on crystals, and numerous investigations by him and his
pupils on crystal lattices, followed by a series of studies on
the quantum theory. Among his collaborators at this time were
many physicists, later to become well-known, such as Pauli, Heisenberg, Jordan,
Fermi, Dirac, Hund, Hylleraas,
Weisskopf, Oppenheimer, Joseph Mayer and Maria Goeppert-Mayer. During the years
1925 and 1926 he published, with Heisenberg and Jordan,
investigations on the principles of quantum mechanics (matrix
mechanics) and soon after this, his own studies on the
statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics.
As were so many other German scientists, he was forced to
emigrate in 1933 and was invited to Cambridge, where he taught
for three years as Stokes Lecturer. His main sphere of work
during this period was in the field of nonlinear electrodynamics,
which he developed in collaboration with Infeld.
During the winter of 1935-1936 Born spent six months in Bangalore
at the Indian Institute of Science, where he worked with Sir C.V. Raman and his
pupils. In 1936 he was appointed Tait Professor of Natural
Philosophy in Edinburgh, where he worked until his retirement in
1953. He is now living at the small spa town, Bad Pyrmont.
Max Born has been awarded fellowships of many academies -
Göttingen, Moscow, Berlin, Bangalore, Bucharest, Edinburgh,
London, Lima, Dublin, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Washington, and
Boston, and he has received honorary doctorates from Bristol,
Bordeaux, Oxford, Freiburg/Breisgau, Edinburgh, Oslo, Brussels
Universities, Humboldt University Berlin, and Technical
University Stuttgart. He holds the Stokes Medal of Cambridge, the
Max Planck Medaille der Deutschen Physikalischen Gesellschaft
(i.e. of the German Physical Society); the Hughes Medal of the
Royal Society, London, the Hugo Grotius Medal for International
Law, and was also awarded the MacDougall-Brisbane Prize and the
Gunning-Victoria Jubilee Prize of the Royal Society, Edinburgh.
In 1953 he was made honorary citizen of the town of
Göttingen and a year later was granted the Nobel Prize for
Physics. He was awarded the Grand Cross of Merit with Star of the
Order of Merit of the German Federal Republic in 1959.
The year 1913 saw his marriage to Hedwig, née
Ehrenberg, and there are three children of the marriage.
From Nobel Lectures, Physics 1942-1962, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1964
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and first published in the book series Les Prix Nobel. It was later edited and republished in Nobel Lectures. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
For more updated biographical information, see: Born, Max, My Life: Recollections of a Nobel Laureate. Taylor & Francis, London, 1978.
Max Born died on January 5, 1970.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1954
Max Born
