The Namegiving

Course of life
 

1882 12. 11.

Born in Breslau (Germany), to Professor Gustav Born, anatomist and embryologist, and his wife Margarete, née Kauffmann, who was a member of a Silesian family of industrialists.

1888 - 1901

Primary school, High School (König-Wilhelm-Gymnasium) in Breslau

1901

Study-beginning in Breslau, among others Mathematics with J. Rosanes and F. London

1902

After four semesters in Heidelberg and Zurich he visited the university of Göttingen, where he immediately, narrowed relationships to David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski. Both mathematicians were his actual academic teachers. Relationship with James Franck

1904

Breslau - Zurich - Berlin - Göttingen. Private-assistant of David Hilbert. Lectures with Hermann Minkowski (particular relativity-theory) and Waldemar Voigt (crystal-physics) and optics. Seminar held by Felix Klein and Carl Runge over Elasticity-theory

1906

Doctor-examination, magna cum laude, by Hilbert, Runge, Voigt, Schwarzschild. Stay in Cambridge, Lectures with J. Larmor and J. J. THOMSON

1908

Göttingen - co-worker with Minkowski

1909

Habilitation over relativistic electron. Contacts to Einstein

1912

He justified together with Theodore von Karmann the "Quantentheorie" of the specific heat. Works to the fence-dynamics 

1913

Marriage with Hedwig Ehrenberg in Berlin - Grünau. The discovery of the x-ray-interferences delivered additional arguments for Borns method

1914

Summond to the university of Berlin to the relief of Max Planck during the courses. Extra-professor for theoretical physics, kinetic theory solids. A narrow Friendship with his model Albert Einstein began 

1915

Born published the book „Dynamics of the crystal-fences"

1918

Frankfurt - Max von Laue professorship. First own institute, two assistants, among others Otto Stern 

1921

Stimulated from the Bohr - festivals he also took part in the search for a new atom-theory

1922

Summond to the university Göttingen, simultaneous James Franck gets the chair for experimental-physics. Wolfgang Pauli and Werner Heisenberg are assistants of Max Born

1924

Max Born published a paper entitled "Zur Quantenmechanik", and this marked the first time that the phrase "Quantum Mechanics" was ever used. He hired Heisenberg and Pascual Jordan to come and work for him on these problems and it was this fruitful triad that put Heisenberg's ideas into their most useful form. But Born's most memorable contribution concerns the way in which we are to regard quantum mechanics. What is this wavefunction? What does it mean? Born suggested that the only observable aspect of the wavefunction was its square, not the wavefunction itself. He held that the correct interpretation of the wavefunction, was that the square at a given point in space, was proportional to the probability of finding the particle at that point in space. The square is called the probability density while we can call the wavefunction is probability amplitude

1925

Werner Heisenberg, a 24-year old assistant of Born, formulated a base idea, so that, -  in cooperation with Pascual Jordan and Heisenberg - Born could develop the closed Mathematical theory of the quantum mechanics (interpretation of the quantenmechanical push-process). „Heisenbergs multiplication-rules didn't give me any rest, and after eight days intensive thinking and trying, I suddenly remembered an algebraic theory, which I have learned from my teacher Professor Rosanes in Breslau. This result touched me like a seafarer who has reached, after a long distance wandering, that longed for country. I was convinced from the first moment on that we find out the right things."

1926

Born delivered a fundamental contribution to the physical interpretation of this calculation and with it the understanding of the odd difficulties in human thinking of „logic of the atoms"

1933

Born first emmigrated to Cambridge and then to Edingburgh, where he continued teaching (17 years) theoretical physics. The cooperation of his students Oppenheimer and Teller during the development of holocaust-methods hurt him deeply

1934 - 1935

Work at Cavendish - laboratory in Cambridge, lecture over not-linear electrodynamics

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

1936 - 1954

Tait - chair in Edinburgh as successors of Charles Galton Darwin

1954

He got the Nobel prize (physics) for his researches to the statistical interpretation of the quantum mechanics:
 
"for his fundamental research in quantum mechanics, especially for his statistical interpretation of the wavefunction"  nobelprize.org  >>>
 
In the same year he returned to Germany and lives their in a small spa town, Bad Pyrmont

1955

Initiation of the "Mainauer Manifestation", to the danger of the atomic weapons

05. 01. 1970

He died in Göttingen and he is also there buried
 

Awards

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
 

By the way:
Olivia Newton-John, the very known pop-singer, song-writer and actress, was born in Cambridge, England. Her parents were Brinley Newton-John and Irene Born (b. 25 May 1914). Irene was the eldest child of Max Born, who fled from Germany with his wife in the 1930s in order to avoid persecution due to Born's Jewish heritage and his wife's part Jewish descent. Olivia's father, Brin Newton-John, from Wales, was an MI5 officer attached to the Enigma machine project at Bletchley Park, and the officer who took Rudolf Hess into custody when he parachuted into Scotland in May 1941. After World War II, he became a professor of German at the UNSW annex at Tighes Hill in Newcastle, Australia. In 1954, at the age of five, Newton-John, her parents Brin and Irene, and her older siblings Hugh and Rona, relocated to Melbourne, Australia, where her father had taken a job at Melbourne University as the Master of Ormond College
 

Literature:

Born, Max:

Ausgewählte Abhandlungen, 2 Bde., Göttingen 1963

Einstein, Albert; Born, Hedwig und Max:

Briefwechsel, München 1969

Born, Hedwig und Max:  

Der Luxus des Gewissens, München 1969

Born, Max:  

Mein Leben, München 1975

Untersuchungen über die Stabilität der elastischen Linie
in Ebene und Raum, unter verschiedenen Grenzbedingungen (Dissertation 1906)

Dynamik der Kristallgitter (1915)

Die Relativitätstheorie Einsteins (1920), Springer, ISBN 3-540-04540-6, 1984,
Unveränd. Nachdr. d. 5. Aufl. 1969

Vorlesungen über Atommechanik (1925)

Experiment und Theorie in der Physik

Optik: ein Lehrbuch der elektromagnetischen Lichttheorie (1933),
Springer, 1985, 3. Aufl., 2. Nachdr.

mit Emil Wolf

Principles of Optics (1959)

Physik im Wandel meiner Zeit,  Braunschweig : Vieweg, 1983,
Unveränd. Nachdr. d. 4., erw. Aufl., 1966 /
mit einl. Bemerkungen von Roman U. Sexl u. Karl von Meyenn

Von der Verantwortung des Naturwissenschaftlers

Baumeister der Quantenwelt Greenspan, Nancy T.. -
München: Elsevier, Spektrum, Akad. Verl., 2006, 1. Aufl.

Max-Born-Institut

www.mbi-berlin.de

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© by T. C. & S. E. D.