Max Born

Born: 11 Dec 1882 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland)
Died: 5 Jan 1970 in Göttingen, Germany

Max Born attended school in Breslau, studying a wide range of subjects. He showed little promise at school and in particular he showed more interest in the humanities than in the sciences. Entering the University of Breslau in 1901 he took a wide range of science subjects, mainly to go along with his father's wishes (his father had died shortly before Max left school).

Max's favourite subjects from the ones he studied were mathematics and astronomy and he thought of specialising in astronomy. He spent 1902 in Heidelberg, then 1903 at Zurich. In Zurich he attended his first course on advanced mathematics, a course by Hurwitz on elliptic functions.

Back in Breslau he talked to his fellow students Toeplitz and Hellinger who told him of the great teachers of mathematics, Klein, Hilbert and Minkowski, at the University of Göttingen. Born was soon in Göttingen attending lectures by Hilbert and Minkowski.

He became Hilbert's assistant in 1905, continuing to attend lectures by Klein and Runge. However he annoyed Klein by only making irregular attendances at his lectures, so Born decided to substitute astronomy for geometry as one of his doctoral subjects. He attended Schwarzschild's astronomy lectures and successfully obtained his doctorate in 1907.

In addition to the mathematicians mentioned above, Born was in contact with Courant, Schmidt and Carathéodory around this period. After taking his doctorate he visited Cambridge for a while but made less of Larmor's lectures than he might because he had difficulty with Larmor's Irish accent.

Born returned to Breslau, then visited Göttingen again in 1909 and began a collaboration with Minkowski who died only weeks after the collaboration had begun. In 1912 Born was offered a post in Göttingen and, once on the teaching staff, he began a research project with von Kármán. This work was on lattice dynamics where they identified the degrees of freedom of a crystal with the normal modes of vibration of the whole body. Their work uses three dimensional Fourier analysis and periodic boundary conditions.

In 1914 Born was offered a chair at Berlin where he became a colleague of Planck. In 1919 he moved to a chair in Frankfurt-am-Main but two years later he was back in Göttingen.

In 1921, the year he became professor at Göttingen, he reformulated the First Law of Thermodynamics. In 1926 Born collaborated with Pauli and Heisenberg, who was a student of Born's, on quantum theory. Born recognised Heisenberg's approach to quantum mechanics as being matrix algebra.

Born produced work of fundamental importance in quantum mechanics beginning with this collaboration. His treatment replaced the original quantum theory, which regarded electrons as particles, with a mathematical description representing their observed behaviour more accurately.

Born was forced, as a Jew, to flee Germany in 1933 and, after a short while in the north of Italy, he accepted an offer to became Stokes lecturer at Cambridge.

In 1936 he was appointed to a chair in Edinburgh. There he introduced a continental style research group comprising mostly refugees from Europe. One of his research students described Born's days in Edinburgh:-

When Born arrived in the morning he first used to make the round of his research students, asking them whether they had any progress to report, and giving them advice, sometimes presenting them with sheets of elaborate calculations concerning their problems which he had himself done the day before. ... The rest of the morning was spent by Born in delivering his lectures to undergraduate honours students, attending to departmental business, and doing research work of his own. Most of the latter, however he used to carry out at home in the afternoons and evenings.

... for his contributions to theoretical physics an general and to the development of quantum mechanics in particular.

Born wrote many textbooks and monographs, mostly for students or experts in the subjects but some popular accounts of science. His publication list includes at least 360 items.